The tallest completed building in the UK is not a skyscraper, but the Emley Moor Transmitter at Huddersfield, completed in 1971 and standing 280m tall. Coming in at number two is One Canada Square, the Canary Wharf tower with the pyramid shaped top, completed twenty years later. That is 235.1metres tall, so the view from the top floor must be pretty good, but it ceased to function as an observation level in the mid 90s, leaving Britain as the only country in Europe not to have an observation level at the top of its tallest building. There are fifty floors over ground, but no floor number thirteen. Other facts I previously didn't know about One Canada Square is that it has 36 lifts, the steel structural frame weighs 27,000 tonnes and the cladding another 47,000 tonnes.
The Shard when completed is due to knock One Canada Square into a distance second place, as it will rise to 310 metres. This was scaled back from the original proposal for 380 metres. The part built Shard overtook One Canada Square as long ago as November 2010, and it is due to be finished this year. There will be a public viewing gallery 243.8 metres above the ground. Ironically, the name was coined by English Heritage, who dubbed the tower a shard of glass stabbing the heart of historic London. Thanks guys, cool suggestion, we'll use that.
Statistics on buildings use their own terminology, like data on most things. I puzzled for a while over Roof Height (AOD) before working out that AOD stood for 'above ordnance datum' (ordnance datum in Great Britain is the mean sea level at Newlyn in Cornwall between 1915 and 1921), and that Roof Height (AGL) must stand for Roof Height above ground level. Roof height (AGL) is the measurement used in rankings of building heights. Raising the top even nearer to heaven by standing your building on a mountain doesn't give you a comparative advantage in the tall building stakes.
You get the top thirty buildings in the UK, ranked by height. The first entry from outside London feiatures at number ten, the Beetham Tower in Manchester which is a mixture of hotel and residential, and in total only six of the thirty are outside London. The Blackpool Tower is at number 18, the London Eye at 21 and Wembley Stadium at 23.. The top thirty is limited to completed buildings, so there'll be some changes in the rankings as various projects get finished, though yesterday's Evening Standard was not very optimistic about how lettings are going, and some partly built towers may end up shorter than originally envisaged.
You can look up details of tall buildings for any city. London has 2,717 entries, Manchester 466, Ludlow only one. Actually, lots of places only have one or two tall buildings listed. (The facility to list by location isn't obvious from the menu, and I fell into it while fiddling around with the search option). Colchester has seven entries, including Colchester Castle, status complete, completion date 1100. The other six are the student blocks at the university, height 43 metres, 14 floors. No images are available but I can tell you that they look like the towers of Mordor (black, forbidding). Identical.
The list of buildings for London are a geography of memory, and of the imagination. A palimsest, they include not merely buildings demolished, but buildings never built, and buildings that exist as 'visions'. Somebody might build them one day, depending on the economy and the planners, or they might join the ranks of the cancelled. The Aldgate Tower existed as a 325 metre possibility in the late 80s, and was cancelled as the market collapsed. The original Wembley Park observation tower, completed in 1907, stood at 353 metres making it the tallest thing to have actually been built, until it was demolished. [Erratum The Systems Administrator pointed out to me that this was proposed, but aborted when the ground proved too soft.] Of the top twenty tallest buildings ever proposed for London, according to Skyscraper News, one was built and four are under construction. The others are all visions, in pre-planning, on hold, or in five cases cancelled. Architecture must be one of the most soul-destroying art forms, as your chances of seeing your idea become even approximately realised are pretty low, according to this database.
It struck me yesterday as our buses trundled through the City, how many holes in the ground there were, and how often I struggled to remember what had been there before, beyond a feeling that it had been post war and not very interesting. Some, like Bucklersbury House, I remember being frankly hideous. The table bears my impression out, with buildings erected in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s already demolished to make room for something else, or in many cases representing failed experiments in high-rise living. Ropemaker Place, completed in 1987, was demolished in 2005. We can't afford to go squandering materials and energy like that, and need to learn to build better and for the longer term.
Addendum Having written this on Wednesday afternoon I failed to press the Publish button, and found it still in draft when I posted Thursday's blog. That is the first time I have ever failed to post, which is rather a waste when I did write it on the day. My trip to London and the shock of paying for my 40,000 mile service for the Skoda were obviously too much for me. Erratum In the blog as originally posted, I said that the old Wembley Park had a tall tower, but in fact that was abandoned when only partly built, so it didn't. I should have known that, and it proves that I should look at big databases found on the internet more carefully. All I can say I wasn't concentrating when I wrote the post. Sorry about that.
You can look up details of tall buildings for any city. London has 2,717 entries, Manchester 466, Ludlow only one. Actually, lots of places only have one or two tall buildings listed. (The facility to list by location isn't obvious from the menu, and I fell into it while fiddling around with the search option). Colchester has seven entries, including Colchester Castle, status complete, completion date 1100. The other six are the student blocks at the university, height 43 metres, 14 floors. No images are available but I can tell you that they look like the towers of Mordor (black, forbidding). Identical.
The list of buildings for London are a geography of memory, and of the imagination. A palimsest, they include not merely buildings demolished, but buildings never built, and buildings that exist as 'visions'. Somebody might build them one day, depending on the economy and the planners, or they might join the ranks of the cancelled. The Aldgate Tower existed as a 325 metre possibility in the late 80s, and was cancelled as the market collapsed. The original Wembley Park observation tower, completed in 1907, stood at 353 metres making it the tallest thing to have actually been built, until it was demolished. [Erratum The Systems Administrator pointed out to me that this was proposed, but aborted when the ground proved too soft.] Of the top twenty tallest buildings ever proposed for London, according to Skyscraper News, one was built and four are under construction. The others are all visions, in pre-planning, on hold, or in five cases cancelled. Architecture must be one of the most soul-destroying art forms, as your chances of seeing your idea become even approximately realised are pretty low, according to this database.
It struck me yesterday as our buses trundled through the City, how many holes in the ground there were, and how often I struggled to remember what had been there before, beyond a feeling that it had been post war and not very interesting. Some, like Bucklersbury House, I remember being frankly hideous. The table bears my impression out, with buildings erected in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s already demolished to make room for something else, or in many cases representing failed experiments in high-rise living. Ropemaker Place, completed in 1987, was demolished in 2005. We can't afford to go squandering materials and energy like that, and need to learn to build better and for the longer term.
Addendum Having written this on Wednesday afternoon I failed to press the Publish button, and found it still in draft when I posted Thursday's blog. That is the first time I have ever failed to post, which is rather a waste when I did write it on the day. My trip to London and the shock of paying for my 40,000 mile service for the Skoda were obviously too much for me. Erratum In the blog as originally posted, I said that the old Wembley Park had a tall tower, but in fact that was abandoned when only partly built, so it didn't. I should have known that, and it proves that I should look at big databases found on the internet more carefully. All I can say I wasn't concentrating when I wrote the post. Sorry about that.
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