Tower sights in London
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30 St Mary Axe
Known to one and all as ‘the Gherkin’ (for obvious reasons when you see its incredible shape), 30 St Mary Axe – as it is officially and far more prosaically named – remains London’s most distinctive skyscraper, dominating the city despite actually being slightly smaller than the neighbouring NatWest Tower. The phallic Gherkin’s futuristic, sci-fi exterior has become an emblem of modern London as recognisable as Big Ben or the London Eye. Built in 2002–03 to a multi-award-winning design by Norman Foster, this is London’s first ecofriendly skyscraper: Foster laid out the offices so they spiral around internal ‘sky gardens’. The windows can be opened and the gardens are used…
reviewed
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B
Lloyd’s of London
While the world’s leading insurance brokers are inside underwriting everything from trains, planes and ships to cosmonauts’ lives and film stars’ legs, people outside still stop to gawp at the stainless-steel external ducting and staircases of the Lloyd’s of London building. French free climber, or ‘spiderman’, Alain Robert even felt moved to scale the exterior with his bare hands in 2003. Lloyd’s is the work of Richard Rogers, one of the architects of the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and although it was a watershed for London when it was built in 1986, it’s since been overtaken by plenty of other stunning architecture throughout the capital and looks rather tiny next to the…
reviewed
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C
St Augustine’s Tower
West of Sutton House in the restored St John’s Churchyard Gardens is 13th-century St Augustine’s Tower, all that remains of a church that was demolished in 1798. The tower and its 135 steps can be climbed on special open days. See the website for details.
reviewed
