England’s Giant Death Ray

The City of London – a one-square-mile enclave on the north bank of the River Thames, is the oldest borough in the UK capital – and one of the strangest. Though surrounded by and part of the sprawling metropolis known as Greater London, the City of London is in fact its own, semi-independent ceremonial county, with its own police force and governing body – the City of London Corporation. This city-within-a-city even has its own separate leader, the Lord Mayor of London, who holds traditional powers and privileges more than a thousand years old and is, unlike the regular Mayor of London, answerable only to the Sovereign. As the cultural and financial centre of London and the UK, the City is home to many of the capital’s most iconic buildings including St. Paul’s Cathedral and the Old Bailey courthouse as well as the headquarters of major financial institutions such as the Bank of England, the London Stock Exchange, and insurer Lloyd’s of London. In more recent years, however, the City has become famous – and sometimes infamous – for its collection of uniquely-designed skyscrapers, many of which have acquired suitably whimsical nicknames. These include 52 Lime Street – AKA “The Scalpel”; 122 Leadenhall Street – AKA “The Cheese Grater”; and 30 St. Mary Axe – AKA “The Gherkin.” While some have praised these structures for their architectural innovation, others have condemned them for spoiling the skyline of the ancient city. But whatever your opinion on the aesthetic merits of contemporary architecture, I think we can all agree that when a building starts inflicting property damage on the surrounding neighbourhood, something has gone horribly wrong. Such was the case with 20 Fenchurch Street AKA the “Walkie-Talkie”, which midway through its construction transformed, supervillain-lair-style into a giant car-melting death ray. This is the story of London’s most controversial skyscraper.

The site of 20 Fenchurch Street, about a kilometre northwest of Tower Bridge, was formerly home to a 91 metre tall, 25-storey tower built in 1968 and occupied by French banking firm SG Kleinwort Hambros. This building was demolished in late 2008, to make way for a new, radical structure developed by the Canary Wharf Construction and Land Securities. Designed by Uruguayan architect Rafael Viñoly, the 37-storey, 160 metre-tall tower defied architectural convention by rapidly flaring out as it rose, creating a dramatically curved, top-heavy profile that quickly earned it the nickname of “walkie-talkie.” This inverted design meant that the higher – and thus more expensive – the floor, the larger it would be. According to Peter Rees, the City of London’s former chief planner who presided over the Walkie-Talkie’s construction, the intention was to create an open space with spectacular panoramic views of the city where the building’s tenants – largely insurance company employees – could hold face-to-face meetings or relax with a drink or meal after work:

“The building’s raison d’etre was to provide a new kind of Assembly Rooms…a place that City types could go in the evening to harrumph and hurroar, then stagger back to Liverpool Street station – and it’s worked enormously well for that purpose…The secret of the City’s success is having places to gossip. We are taking every opportunity to create the party city in the sky; it’s very important to our business offer that people can party as close to their desks as possible.”

More poetically, Rees described the building as:

“…the figurehead at the prow of our ship [complete with a] viewing platform where you can look back to the vibrancy of the City’s engine room behind you.”

The public’s reaction, however, was less enthusiastic. From its announcement in 2004, the building’s design has been derisively compared to everything from a misplaced pint glass to a sanitary napkin. The structure also came under criticism from the likes of UNESCO and English Heritage, the latter describing the Walkie-Talkie as an “oppressive and overwhelming form” and a “brutally dominant expression of commercial floor space” that would spoil the skyline and the view of heritage monuments like Tower Bridge. Meanwhile, the tower’s future neighbours contested the development on grounds of their right to light. Despite this, however, Peter Rees pushed the approval through, with piling and foundation work beginning in early 2009. According to Rees, the main reason for approving the project was Rafael Viñoly’s proposal to turn the top three floors of the tower into a “Sky Garden”, an urban green space open to the residents of London. As the architect explained:

“Every building is an occupation of the skyline, but most don’t give anything back. You have to ask what the public gets by accepting a further intrusion on the city. The possibility of offering an urban experience at a height is pretty remarkable.”

Yet right out the gate, the project was plagued by the first of many problems as the effects of the 2008 global financial crisis forced construction to halt in mid-2009. It would only resume in January 2011, the building’s concrete core being completed in March 2012 and its steel framework in December 2012. Then, in late August 2013, while the building’s windows were being installed, business owners along Eastcheap Street discovered to their horror that the Walkie-Talkie’s offensive capabilities went far beyond the purely aesthetic. For a few hours each morning, the building’s curved glass facade acted as a giant parabolic mirror, concentrating the sun’s light into what can only be described as a heat ray, producing temperatures as high as 117 degrees Celsius. At Rey Style Barbers, owned by Ali Akay, the concentrated beam of light set fire to the shop’s doormat:

“We were working and just saw the smoke coming out of the carpet. We tried to cut the fire down, there were customers in at the time and they were obviously not happy. Customers are not going to come in if there is a fire in the front of the door.”

Next door at the Viet Cafe, owner Diana Pham had a similarly scorching experience:

“Yesterday it was very hot so there was a concentration of light here. We thought something was burning in the restaurant but it wasn’t. we searched everywhere. Then a customer came in and showed us. A tile suddenly broke, the paint has bubbled too.”

But the event that made headlines around the world occurred on Thursday, August 30 when Martin Lindsay, director of a tiling company, parked his Jaguar XJ on Eastcheap street. He returned an hour later to find that the heat ray had melted and warped his car’s wing mirror, body mirror, and Jaguar badge. The day before, a similar fate befell a Vauxhall Vevaro van belonging to air conditioning engineer Eddie Cannon:

“The van looks a total mess – every bit of plastic on the left hand side and everything on the dashboard has melted, including a bottle of Lucozade that looks like it has been baked… When I got in the van it was a really strange light – like it was illuminated and they were filming. I want to know what effect it’s having on people walking down the road.”

The destructive phenomenon soon drew large crowds of curious onlookers, and earned 20 Fenchurch Street the new monikers “Walkie Scorchie” and “Fryscraper.” And in true cheeky London news fashion, City A.M. reporter Jim Waterson toasted a baguette and fried an egg using the reflective heat.

So what happened? Were Rafael Viñoly and the City of London secretly comic book supervillains, bent on world – or at least city – domination? Had the Walkie-Talkie suddenly become self-aware and begun lashing out at its own cursed existence? No: the root of the problem turned out to be – as it often is with such projects – cost-cutting measures. Viñoly had actually anticipated the parabolic mirror effect, with his original design incorporating louvred windows break up the reflections. But following the two-year construction halt caused by the financial crisis, these were deleted to reduce construction costs – with unfortunate results. Indeed, this was not the first time Viñoly had dealt with this problem; his Vdara hotel in Las Vegas, opened in 2009, generated a similar “heat ray”, which was eventually mitigated by coating the windows in non-reflective film. In the case of the Walkie-Talkie, Viñoly blamed the overlooked design change on the intricacies of London city planning, stating:

“One problem that happens in this town, is the super-abundance of consultancies and sub-consultancies that dilute the responsibility of the designer to the point that you just don’t know where you are any more.”

Bizarrely, Viñoly also partially blamed the heat ray effect on climate change, stating in an interview with The Guardian that:

“[I] didn’t realise it was going to be so hot. When I first came to London years ago, it wasn’t like this … Now you have all these sunny days.”

Thankfully for the residents of Eastcheap Street, by late September the sun’s position had shifted and the “Walkie-Scorchie” effect disappeared. Many of those effected – including Jaguar owner Martin Lindsay – received compensation from Canary Wharf Construction and Land Securities for inflicted damages, while the City of London erected a temporary scaffold with screening to break up the heat ray the following summer. Finally, in 2014, a permanent sunshade was installed on the building’s upper floors. In April of that year the building was completed at a total cost of £200 million, with the first tenants moving in in August. And in January 2015, the much-anticipated Sky Garden opened to the public.

But like much else regarding the Walkie-Talkie, the Sky Garden proved to be not quite as advertised. As The Guardian’s architecture critic Oliver Wainwright wrote shortly after the Garden’s opening:

“In theory, by lumbering into the middle of it all, the Walkie-Talkie provides the best aerial view of London. But the reality is that to appreciate this 360-degree vista, you actually have to look quite hard. For what stands out in the foreground is the great cage of steelwork that flexes in all directions, wrapping 15m above your head in a voluminous arc and plunging down in front of the glass facades. You are invited to behold less the skyline of London than the structural gymnastics of the architect….It feels a lot like being in an airport terminal, jacked up in the air.

In fact, wherever you are in the sky garden, the views feel frustratingly distant. The city is separated from your gaze by a buffer of external parapets to the north and a smokers’ terrace to the south; nowhere can you put your face to the glass and look right down. The whole of London spreads out below, but you’ll have to crane your neck to see it.

That must be how the remaining City planners are feeling now. They were promised a Babylonian hanging gardens, the pride of the square mile, accessible to all. True, the public may visit for free, by booking online three days in advance, for 1.5-hour time slots vetted by the City, but they will be shooed out by 6pm to make way for the paying clientele to enjoy the twinkling lights over cocktails. It is not the public park that was promised, but another private party space, available by appointment.

A source close to the planning department is candid: “It’s still very much a live issue here. Let’s say it isn’t necessarily quite what it was meant to be.”

And just as it had from the beginning, the completed Walkie-Talkie continued to draw public ire over its questionable aesthetics, with Christopher Costelloe stating that “…its bulbous shape makes it probably the ugliest building in London which distracts from other listed buildings”. And in 2015, the year the Sky Garden officially opened, Building Design Magazine awarded the Walkie Talkie the Carbuncle Cup for the worst building in the UK – the award’s name a cheeky reference to an infamous speech given by Prince – now King – Charles, a noted opponent of modern architecture. Yet the building’s designer brushed off criticism of his creation and is supposed despoliation of the London skyline, stating:

“Am I breaking the illusion that we’re living in the 13th century? The view from the Tower is already ruined – would it be logical to demolish all of the visible modern buildings?”

Peter Rees, the other major driving force behind the project agrees, arguing that:

“As Oscar Niemeyer used to say, ‘’You can like it or dislike it, but you’re not going to forget it.’”

Carbuncle or not, 20 Fenchurch Street is still prime real estate in the heart of London’s financial district, and in 2017 the controversial building became the object of the largest real estate deal in UK history, being sold to Hong Kong-based condiments and healthcare product manufacturer Lee Kum Kee Group for a whopping £1.3 billion. Time will tell whether Londoners will continue to deride the oddly-shaped tower or come to embrace it an eccentric part of the city’s fabric. Whatever the case, it is good to know that if heat ray-packing Martians ever attack War of the Worlds -style, Londoners will have some means of fighting back.

Expand for References