Investigation into London’s new luxury housing
Image Credit: PA
All copy is reproduced here as it was supplied by Oliver Bennett to the client or publication.
Centre Point must be one of the most divisive landmarks in London. Erected in 1966, it instantly dominated the West End and while some celebrated it – architect Erno Goldfinger called it “London’s first pop art skyscraper” and amazingly, likened it in spirit to The Beatles and Mary Quant – the brainchild of reclusive developer Harry Hyams has had a mixed reception over its 52 years.
But perhaps Centre Point’s most curious fate has been to remain more or less empty. It never fully worked as offices. In 1972 Camden Council tried to requisition it. Harold Wilson wanted to nationalise it. It was occupied for a weekend by housing activists in 1974 – one was Labour politician Jack Dromey, Harriet Harman’s husband. A major homelessness charity was named after it. Then a Grade-II listing and a recherché desire for Brutalist icons (it came from the feted drawing board of Richard Seifert’s master architect, George Marsh) bought its zig-zag façade back into favourable view and it become luxury flats, synced to the new Crossrail development. What could go wrong?
Well, the Centre Point curse has struck again. In October its developer Almacantar decided that offers on its remaining luxury flats were “derisory” and “detached from reality”, and decided to take them off the market. So Centre Point has now cemented and updated its footnote in London folklore as one of the capital’s benighted “ghost towers”.
From Centre Point to the Shard, from Battersea Power Station to the sky-reaching baubles of Nine Elms – even in The Independent’s old neighbourhood in City Road – the past six years or so has seen London become filled with tall glass and steel icons that are conspicuously under-occupied: built in a time of optimism for an overseas market and now languishing unsold or OLE: owned and left empty.
Continued/