Tulip rejected over embodied carbon and heritage concerns

The decision ends years of planning wrangling, which started in 2018 when Fosters submitted plans for the 305m-tall tourist attraction for a site by the Gherkin in the City of London.

The City of London approved the highly controversial skyscraper in spring 2019, but London mayor Sadiq Khan overturned the decision, calling it an ‘unwelcoming, poorly designed’ mega-project.

Now the application has reached the end of the road, with housing minister Christopher Pincher deciding to follow the recommendation of planning inspector David Nicholson. Nicholson concluded the scheme should be rejected following a multi-week public inquiry held last November.

It emerged this week that the planning inquiry has cost the UK taxpayer almost £520,000 following developer J Safra's appeal against the Mayor of London’s decision to reject the Tulip.

In the planning inspector’s report, published for the first time today, Nicholson said the ‘chosen purpose, form, materials and location have resulted in a design that would cause considerable harm to the significance of the Tower of London, and further harm to other designated heritage assets’.

He added: ‘It would do so for the gains that a new visitor attraction would provide to the economy, tourism and education, which are relatively modest by comparison with the City as a whole and with other nearby provisions.

‘Achieving the functional requirements at low level in such a constrained space has been done with consummate skill but would not quite outweigh the harm through loss of highly valued public open space and substantial intrusions into … the setting to the Gherkin.’

The planning inspector said the Tulip proposal was not of the ‘highest architectural quality’ due to the heritage considerations, but also due to its ‘poor lifetime sustainability’.

He added: ‘Although considerable efforts have been made to adopt all available sustainability techniques to make the construction and operation of the scheme as sustainable as possible, fulfilling the brief with a tall, reinforced concrete lift shaft, would result in a scheme with very high embodied energy and an unsustainable whole life-cycle.’

A letter addressed to DP9, which is working for Bury Street Properties, said Pincher agreed with the planning inspector that economic and educational benefits would not counterbalance the damage to heritage assets and the other concerns about the proposed tower.

And it said the housing secretary Michael Gove, who technically ordered the rejection, ‘agrees with the inspector … that the extensive measures that would be taken to minimise carbon emissions during construction would not outweigh the highly unsustainable concept of using vast quantities of reinforced concrete for the foundations and lift shaft to transport visitors to as high a level as possible to enjoy a view.’

The planning inspector also suggested ‘little if any thought has been given to how the building would function over its extended lifetime,’ noting that that there are ‘no plans for its re-use’ whenever its purpose as a viewing tower had been served.

A spokesperson for the mayor of London said: ‘The mayor is delighted that the secretary of state has dismissed this appeal outright, agreeing that the Tulip tower would be the wrong type of building for central London and that it would have a negative, long-term impact on London’s skyline.

‘Sadiq has long argued that the proposed tower would be little more than a concrete lift shaft with a viewing gallery at the top, offering very little in terms of benefits for Londoners, with no new office space or housing.

‘He is disappointed the case went to appeal in the first place, incurring unnecessary costs to the taxpayer.’

An FOI request made by Financial News this week revealed that the estimated cost of the public inquiry to the public is £518,694.71.

This figure includes both central government and GLA spending with the latter instructing Hereward Phillpot QC, a barrister at Francis Taylor Building, who has worked on cases involving several of the government's most significant infrastructure projects, on the appeal, according to Financial News.

Other issues considered by the planning inspector include the loss of the plaza around the Gherkin, which is currently set to be improved by the loss of a nearby ramp during the forthcoming 1 Undershaft development designed by Eric Parry Architects.

The planning inspector said the loss of open public space around the plaza would outweigh benefits to the public realm created through the pavilion and pocket park, as well as the removal of a ramp and retaining wall on the site.

Nicholson declined to make an aesthetic judgment on the Tulip, noting strong disagreement about whether the building looked good. ‘The concept of beauty or otherwise for this appeal is in the eye of the beholder and any further discussion is unlikely to be helpful,’ he wrote.

The inspector admitted he had been impressed by Foster + Partners – ‘one of the greater architectural practices in the world’ – saying the Tulip was ‘undoubtedly the best presented scheme that I have ever seen in my career or am likely to see’.