Herbert Wright looks again: Centre Point
From the deal struck that made this ‘slender blade’ possible, through the conspiracy and controversy it has inspired: this may well be Europe’s most elegant skyscraper, argues Herbert
In the 60s, Swinging London was the grooviest place on the planet… just as a concrete tsunami of road schemes, housing estates and bland office blocks was threatening to smother it. But one masterpiece stood a world above the dismal contemporary architectural scene. According to artist Eduardo Paolozzi, Centre Point was London’s first Pop Art building.
Post-war planners were fixated with road schemes, and in 1959 developer Harry Hyams did a deal with them: if he bought out the occupants at St Giles Circus, they could build a traffic roundabout and he could build twice the office space that regulations allowed. The law on unsecured sites was about to change, but Hyams brought in a tall, pipe-smoking, upcoming architect who had boned up on the rules and worked quickly.
With two days to spare, Richard ‘Colonel’ Seifert submitted architectural plans. By 1962, the whole site was Hyams’, and he sold it to London’s then-authority, the LCC, leased back the building plot, and started building. Just as the Ministry of Transport dropped the roundabout idea, Centre Point was topped out in 1964. With 35 storeys and 120m high, it was the tallest skyscraper in London, only beaten by the mad, boffiny GPO (now Telecom) Tower, which opened in 1965.
Centre Point is not like other 60s office towers. It dazzles. It challenges the monotony of stacking endless identical floors with subtly convex hypnotic honeycomb façades. Nor is it just another box, but a slender blade. Each floor is so thin it can only accommodate about 40 people. Back then, the tower-and-podium formula mounted skyscrapers on dull low-rise platforms; here, the podium is a crazy mix of supporting mosaic-covered ‘dinosaur legs’, concrete slits and a vast glass bridge spanning what would have been the roundabout.
It’s still not clear who the genius behind the design was – some say it was Seifert’s right-hand man, George Marsh. In a book, I gave credit to Seifert himself after interviewing his widow; and in 1961, he certainly conceived the crucial concrete T-sections that frame Centre Point’s windows and give it its look. They allowed fast, dry construction without scaffolding and spread the tower’s weight between the exterior and the core – a structural engineering revolution. But it was Marsh who signed the drawings. I now think it was a genuine collaboration.
In 1965, a huge ‘TO LET’ sign went up… and stayed for 15 years. If Hyams had rented out the empty building, he’d have to pay rates, and the rent would freeze its fast-rising capital value. Outrage and conspiracy theories brewed. Writer Peter Laurie speculated that Centre Point was really secret government offices that could be sealed off from the atmosphere in a chemical or biological attack. In 1969, a homeless charity named after the building set up in the subways underneath it. Things peaked in January 1974. Like a flash mob, 50 activists converged at Tottenham Court Road tube and were given the signal ‘all systems go!’ They crossed the road and squatted it. The leaders issued a statement saying Centre Point was ‘a symbol of corruption’. Police surrounded the building. After two days, the activists voted to accept a police deal to take no names. When they stepped out, a crowd of 2,500 cheered.
Nowadays, three-metre high neon letters crown the building and spell out exactly what it is: London’s ‘CENTRE POINT’. A swank club called Paramount occupies the top floors, but the Crossrail construction site has blitzed the surroundings below. Around 2017, a big new plaza will emerge, and above it, what may be the most elegant 20th-century skyscraper in Europe is set to dazzle for another century.
Photo: Herbert Wright
