Wenjun zheng

Hegemony of the Line: 180 years from London Bridge to London Bridge Submission for AA HTS Thesis Wenjun Zheng Diploma 10 Thesis Advisors: Mark Campbell and Manolis Stavrakakis

0. Intro The story started from London Bridge. The early years of Victorian railway development is a similar story to that of many other industries: small companies mushroomed out of ground overnight, each proposing a similar rail line advertised with the ‘magic’ of new technology. On one hand, they all rushed to expand wildly into the virgin territory of suburban London; on the other hand, they all suffered from immature technology, illmanagement and short of capital chain. Sometimes their lines ran parallel in the same direction hence they were competitors, at other times they had to complement each other to form a complete line to move passengers hence they were allies. With their constantly changing rivalry and alliance, there were clearly no dominance or coordination.

That it was the early stage of an industry meant that nobody knew what would happen in the future.

Decisions were made based on limited vision and highly individualized empirical knowledge – ad hoc and improvised, a timely response to what had happened the day before and by no means any prediction of what would happen the day after. The story of each player in this game seemed opportunistic. However, if we zoom out to look at it against a longer span of history, everything seemed destined from the very start.

When the mass investment bubble collapsed, the stage moved to Liverpool Street. The small start-ups in the early stage either went bankrupt or amalgamated into larger corporates, who were the true survivors from the cruelty of market, who now faced a completely different situation. They each had already a solid net asset of rail lines taken from the smaller companies – no need to build anymore; they each occupied an exclusive territory from central London all the way to the sea – they face no others’ competition. Both technologies and financial techniques had been matured to allow for more advanced management. For the railway oligarchs at this moment, all they needed to consider was how to coordinate their assets strategically and extract maximum profit out of it.

The strategy turned out to be spatial segregation – to separate passengers of different social classes into trains of 1st/2nd/3rd class carriages, by different timetables and to different destinations, simply by that the better-off passengers were willing to pay a bit more to stay by themselves. In this way. meanwhile single section of railway was run under maximum economical and technical efficiency, a sequence of distinctive places was created along the line. When the spatial segregation started from differentiated railway tickets and ended in suburban London’s clustered housing condition – the railway corporates’ financial strategies finally turned into real places.

The Green Belt finally closed the metropolis’s horizontal expansion, but nothing could ever stop our human desire to develop. When there is no way out, there must be some way up. More than a century later, a similar story is taking place at the same sites of London. The sudden deregulation of stock market triggered another round of investment boom, and this time it is about office development… the story started with the rapid amplification of office floor plates over Liverpool Street and ended with the vertical city of the Shard – another line of segregated places whose sequence coincided with that of the first railway, which also started from the same point of London Bridge. The key infrastructure in this case is the lift – the vertical train managed under the same financial strategy developed by the railway corporates 180 years ago. Hence closes another cycle.

The hegemony of the line is ruthless. It doesn’t matter if it is about railway or offices, Internet or real estate. It doesn’t matter what time it is, whether the queen is Victoria or Elizabeth II. It seems to matter if the place is London Bridge or Liverpool Street, but then we realize they only mean within or without the City, where all characters involved in this story worked very hard, city planners, developers, architects and engineers, but nobody remember their names…

1. London Bridge 1836 Before the advent of railway, people had to live close to their employment. In London, that meant adjacent to the City. By 19th century, a large countryside population had flooded into London to seek job opportunity: the growing finance industry in the City demanded more servicing, and the industries that the City didn’t want to include, such as warehouses and food processing, proliferated on south bank of the Thames. Both required intensive manual, low-skilled labour. Hence, the incoming population settled at the periphery of the City.

The area soon deteriorated into inner-city slums. Swamp-prone soil condition, overcrowding, poor housing qualities and lack of sewage and refuse infrastructure all contributed to its unhygienic environment. The establishment of various philanthropic institutions also severed the situation. Despite their well-meant intention to take care of the diseased, prostitutes and mentally-ill, they de-facto served to attract even more of them into the area.1 This preluded the middle-class City workers’ flight out of the City. When the steam-engine train came about, they were given the opportunity to pursue the traditional English ideal of garden houses in the natural landscape of suburban London.

In 1830, the first recognized passenger railway in the world was built between Liverpool and Manchester, which was immediately proven popular and crowded by curious public. Hence started the ‘Railway Mania’, an era of ultra-optimistic railway construction across the country.

It was time when a newly-affluent middle-class majority emerged post Industrial Revolution, who had just improved their fiscal conditions and needed to invest their savings somewhere. The railway companies happened to be exempted from a legal restriction that required businesses to have no more than five investors,2 which made their shares perfect product for mass investment. With new financial techniques developed from the emerging stock market, investors could buy shares with a levered deposit at 10%,3 with the rest only upon request of the company. This made investment more tangible than ever for middle-class households with moderate income, and as a result, many of them were in.

With many heavy player MPs in the Parliament, legislation could only facilitate growth of the bubble.

Although railway companies needed Parliamentary Bill for purchasing the land along their routes (forcing the landowners to sell), there were hardly limitation on their numbers nor any check on their feasibility. Almost anyone could start a company, plan a route, gather investment, and submit it to the Parliament. As a consequence, the number of proposals grew exponentially, with more than half of the UK’s 11,000-mile railways authorised within the three years of 1844-1846.4

In London, many factors supported that its south side should be first developed by railway companies: North of the Thames, the estates around the City were owned by aristocrats, who were both suspicious about the new technology and worried that its construction might undermine the value of their assets. They were also legally conscious about the right to their properties and knew how to hire lawyers to ask for higher compensation.

Ideal Homes, ‘‘St George's Fields, Southwark: From a grand 18th century suburb to 19th century inner-city slums’’. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37751599> 2 Christian Wolmar, ‘‘Midwife to the Underground’’, in The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How it Changed the City Forever, (pub. Atlantic Books. London: 2004), p.18.

3 Christian Wolmar, ‘‘Changing Britain’’, in Fire & Steam: A History of the Railways in Britain, (pub. Alec Tiranti, Ltd. London: 2008), p.71.

4 Christian Wolmar, ‘‘Railways Everywhere’’, in Fire & Steam: A History of the Railways in Britain, (pub. Alec Tiranti, Ltd. London: 2008), p.89.

1

On the contrary, much of the land south of the river was owned by the Church, who gave it to the poor for building their houses. When construction of the railway viaducts required land, both the tenants and their houses turned out to be much more vulnerable in the face of eviction.5

With a not-so-glorious start, the London and Greenwich Railway (LGR) Company opened their first London terminus at London Bridge in 1836.

Around the same time, the London and Croydon Railway (LCR) Company also planned their own route between London Bridge and Croydon. LCR initially didn’t intend to have their own station, but reached an agreement with LGR to join their tracks in Bermondsey and use their approaches into the terminus. However, when the Greenwich line opened, it was proven too popular that the station was not big enough for two lines.

LCR therefore bought land from LGR and built their own station. Still, they needed LGR’s tracks from Bermondsey into their own new station and paid a toll for using them.

LCR’s station was later joined by two other companies: the London and Brighton Railway (LBR) Company in 1842 and the South Eastern Railway (SER) Company in 1843, drawing a route from London Bridge to Brighton and Dover respectively. The latter two joined LCR’s tracks near Norwood, paying a toll to LCR for the section between Norwood and Bermondsey. The three companies then paid LGR a toll for using the tracks from Bermondsey to London Bridge.6

From the very beginning, all four young companies encountered a series of technical difficulties. They first came from laying out the railway tracks, where the unlevel geography of south London needed adaption through either viaduct or tunnel. Still, for difficult sections like that between Dartmouth Arms and New Cross, assistant locomotives had to be hired to pull trains uphill, and the length of trains were thus reduced to only four carriages.

Neither was easy task to operate train services. When the Brighton line opened in 1840, it contributed 240 patients to County Hospital within the first week, out of which 11 were urgent cases.7 More accidents and delays came along afterwards. Some of them were caused by derailing of trains or break-down of locomotives, but others were simply poor management – one delay was reported due to the intermediate station staff spending too much time issuing ticket, collecting money, and returning change.8 These things then added up to financial difficulties.

Construction of the viaduct, and purchasing the land it required, turned out far costlier than the companies estimated. They had to expand their railway network section by section, building whatever they could afford, and use other companies’ tracks to reach their destinations by paying a toll. Sometimes a proposal had to be dropped for short of budget, which then turned the properties the company had already purchased for it into wasteful investment.9 Then running the services was also costly, but not necessarily profiting. The cost was made up by two parts – driving the locomotive and paying the toll for using other companies’ tracks. The capital return was especially low when the traffic was for short distances. The station at Penge on the Croydon line, for example, was closed in 1841 due to unfeasible traffic.10 Christian Wolmar, ‘‘Midwife to the Underground’’, in The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How it Changed the City Forever, (pub. Atlantic Books. London: 2004), p.18.

6 W. J. Gordon, ‘‘London’s First Railways’’, in Our Home Railways: How they began and how they are worked, (pub. Frederick Warne.

London: 1910), p.187.

7 John Howard Turner, ‘‘The First Years of the Croydon and Brighton Companies’’, in London, Brighton and South Coast Railway: 1. Origins and Formation: Origins and Foundations, (pub. Batsford. London: 1977), p.160.

8 Ibid, p.161.

9 Ibid, pp.150,154.

10 Ibid, p.166.

5

However, nothing could be an excuse when it came to the dividends to shareholders. The railway companies must keep their promise as it was the only way they could continue attracting capital into their business. In the years of Railway Mania, railway shares continuously outperformed other means of investment. LBR even doubled their dividend rate meanwhile the interest rate of government bond was dropping.11

Hence, the tolls that one company paid for using another company’s tracks became a tricky element. The toll was not a fixed amount by section of railway, but charged per passenger, equivalent to 20-30% of ticket price, which means that the lessee company’s already-narrow profit had one portion automatically going into the lesser company’s pocket and increasing traffic did not help with the situation. On one hand, the toll made a heavy burden for the lessee company (LCR/LBR/SER), but on the other hand, it became a primary source of income for the lesser company (LGR/LCR).

Conflict rose from here between the four companies. As LGR was holding the threshold tracks into the station, the other three companies all had to pay a toll for using this last-mile of tracks. They set up a joint committee to work against it in the Parliament.12 But neither could LGR afford to lose this important revenue as it only owned a short section of train line from London Bridge to Greenwich, far less profitable than other mainline services.

The conflict quickly turned into physical actions.

Due to short-sighted decision in the beginning, the three companies were using the southern tracks while their station was to the north of LGR’s. This meant a dangerous crossing that had to be solved with designed signalling and co-ordination between the four companies’ services – they must be run with a time interval compatible with each other. However, the first month LCR joined the station, two of its trains arrived with no tail lights, almost causing collisions.13 Then four months later, it revised its timetable without informing LGR, and created a real clash of timings. Of course, this timetable had to be taken back in the end.14 It was an unsuccessful attempt to urge LGR to lower its tolls. Another opportunity appeared when the station was declared overcrowded. LCR proposed that it should buy the land from LGR and build an extra viaduct by themselves, therefore no longer needing to pay any toll into the station. Meanwhile, SER proposed that another terminus should be built at Elephant and Castle, so that it could avoid tolls to both LGR and LCR. Exactly because of the two counter proposals, LGR won in the end the Parliament Bill to widen its existing viaduct –now it could charge an additional toll from all three other companies.15 This drove the lessee companies desperate, who then took actions to discourage their passengers from travelling on LGR’s section of railway into the City. LCR first suggested their passengers should take a bus ride between New Cross and London Bridge. After this effort ended up in vein, it then charged a higher ticket price to urge their passengers to get off earlier. SER, on the other hand, simply refused to convey 3rd-class passengers north of New Cross, rather running their vehicle empty to avoid the tolls.16

Railway Mania, ‘‘Narrative’’. <http://www.railwaymania.co.uk/narrative.html> John Howard Turner, ‘‘The First Years of the Croydon and Brighton Companies’’, in London, Brighton and South Coast Railway: 1. Origins and Formation: Origins and Foundations, (pub. Batsford. London: 1977), p.158.

13 Ibid, p.152.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid, p.156.

16 John Howard Turner, ‘‘The Opening of the South Eastern Railway and its Effects, 1842-44’’, in London, Brighton and South Coast Railway: 1. Origins and Formation: Origins and Foundations, (pub. Batsford. London: 1977), pp.173-174.

11 12

It was the early years of railway development, and no company factually gained control over their ticket prices.

LGR, the first railway company, decided to relate its ticket price to the construction cost of the viaduct, thanks to its overspending in the beginning. It soon dropped as their rail line, connecting London Bridge to Greenwich, faced competition from mature road and water traffic along this route.17 LCR, on the other hand, discounted their price for further destinations to encourage commuter traffic to the then-not-so-inhabited southern suburbs.

Many factors played a part in deciding the price: construction cost of the line, tolls to other companies, financial condition of the company, rival company’s pricing policy… the only spatial factor being the physical distance the passengers travelled, again related to cost of construction. Even when the companies could charge differently by section of the line, it was the three companies working against LGR to protest its tolls – places were not their concerns.

However, under this crude model of management all companies survived and expanded. They started from a quasi-blank-canvas condition – the vast land between New Cross and Croydon were largely open field before the rail lines spread out. The principle of the companies’ wild expansion was only set by their fierce competition against each other, but not further long-term strategies. Sometimes a route was not planned to run train services, but to stop rival companies from gaining it. As we could see today, parallel routes have been built by different companies to serve the same destinations, which later all reached into Victoria and Waterloo as well, giving south London passengers an exclusive choice of where they want to land in London.

The rapid expansion of railway in south London created a network that connected existing towns, between which private landlords quickly developed typical Victorian suburban houses for the new ‘commuting class’ – the first wave of affluent middle-class City workers.

As the companies were preoccupied with their financial struggling and rivalry against each other, difficult landowners like the Dulwich Estates and College were promptly avoided in the planning of their routes.18 As a result, the early railway had little definitive power over the existing demographics of south London. However, they did manage to infill the vast open field between them with relatively homogenous housing.

Nonetheless, what all four companies contributed to is a process that the places along the rail line began to be abstracted into ubiquitous points, only attached with a simple number – its distance to central London. This abstraction became clearer when the view of natural landscape on the way, what was initially advertised as a benefit of commuting, was gradually replaced by greyish rooftops when more suburban houses filled in. And finally, when the underground came along, all developments across London could be advertised by ‘xx minutes to central London’, regardless of their actual location.

London Bridge Station, in 1836, is the start of a line where ideas like ‘public transport’, ‘suburban living’ and ‘commuting’ irreversibly become part of ordinary life.

John Howard Turner, ‘‘The First Years of the Croydon and Brighton Companies’’, in London, Brighton and South Coast Railway: 1. Origins and Formation: Origins and Foundations, (pub. Batsford. London: 1977), p.150.

18 Ideal Homes, ‘‘History of Dulwich’’. <http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/southwark/assets/histories/dulwich> 17

2. Liverpool Street 1874 The railway bubble before collapsing saw 562 petitions passing through the Parliament in the year of 1845.19 4,618 miles of railway awaiting construction,20 the companies needed to call in more capital than ever from their shareholders, even though more lines naturally meant lower profit.

However, in the same year, the tipping point of Railway Mania was triggered by the reckoned poor potato harvest in Ireland, which meant that food must be imported from abroad. When the Bank of England reduced issued notes and raised interest rate, a period of contraction started.21 This was only added by the 1848 outbreak of French Revolution, bringing possibility of war, which further weakened the market.

To keep capital flowing in, railway companies started calling in the 90% share price from those who invested with the 10% deposit, most of whom couldn’t afford it at all. Many other shareholders had also borrowed heavily to invest. Consequentially many households with moderate income lost their entire savings.

Only then regulations stepped in. The so-called ‘Railway Plunder Bill’ allowed the government to either purchase a rail line or revise its ticket fares.22 This led to investors becoming more cautious, and many projects that had passed through the Parliament were dropped for short of capital. By 1850, almost only large companies could start new constructions.

Subsequently, many small railway companies went into financial infeasibility: they either ended up bankrupt, bought up by larger companies, or amalgamated to survive – here the Great Eastern Railway (GER) Company came into being.

GER’s primary constituent company was Eastern Counties Railway (ECR), who in the 1830s gained Parliament Bill to build a mainline from London to Norwich via Colchester. ECR went through a similar story: technical difficulties caused by soil condition; compensation to landlords going over budget; the chairman found dishonest and incompetent; unreliable train services… all summed into the company’s bad reputation which cut its capital supply. As a result, their planned mainline didn’t go beyond Colchester for many years.23 This line’s lack of progress, however, generated a number of other small companies, who each built their own extension beyond Colchester, such as Norwich and Yarmouth Railway (N&YR), Norwich and Brandon Railway (N&BR) and Eastern Union Railway (EUR). Together with companies like Northern and Eastern Railway (N&ER), who borrowed ECR’s London terminus, they amalgamated in 1962 into GER, a company that owned 1,200 miles of rail lines.

The new company inherited its London terminus from ECR in Shoreditch, a small station on viaduct, whose location turned out a major inconvenience – it was not only at least 10 minutes’ walk from any office in the City, but highly inaccessible from rest of the metropolis as well. Therefore, when GER took over, there was already consensus among its shareholders that company must extend rail lines into the City.24

Railway Mania, ‘‘Narrative’’. <http://www.railwaymania.co.uk/narrative.html> Ibid.

21 Christian Wolmar, ‘‘Changing Britain’’, in Fire & Steam: A History of the Railways in Britain, (pub. Alec Tiranti, Ltd. London: 2008), p.71.

22 Railway Mania, ‘‘Narrative’’. <http://www.railwaymania.co.uk/narrative.html> 23 LNER, ‘‘History of the GER's Constituent Companies’’. <http://www.lner.info/co/GER/prehistory.php> 24 Nick Derbyshire, ‘‘The 1875 Station’’, in Liverpool Street: a station for the twenty-first century, (pub. Granta Editions. Cambridge: 1991), p.20.

19 20

The location of the new terminus was chosen to connect to the London Metropolitan Railway, the world’s first underground line, in hope that it would bring in more traffic. Hence this time, the company’s task was the opposite of expansion in virgin territories, but to penetrate through a most densely inhabited area of the City. By then the social cost of railway construction was already realized – in the year 1864, the City Corporation protested as its 121 streets had been affected.25 The viaducts’ aggressive progression meant hundreds of houses demolished and streets interrupted.

However, the scheme was only slightly postponed by the company’s initial financial condition. GER turned out successful in its negotiation with the landowners. Institutions such as Bethlem Hospital received their agreed amounts with no objection. The smaller property owners, who protested their losing business, ended up happy with their compensation as well.26 Even the working-class tenants of the houses, whom railways companies were theoretically obliged to compensate, had been evicted by their private landlords before the Compulsory Purchase Bill arrived. Of course, the hope was that once the new station was built, the suburban traffic it generated would pay off all these efforts.

Liverpool Street Station was credited to one single ‘architect’ – Edward Wilson, who owned a large construction engineering practice in Westminster.27 Though many more parties must have been involved, this set the tone for the station to become a manifestation of engineering achievement.

The demolition of the station site took only a bit more than a year. By 1871, construction work was ready to start.28 The contractors, Lucas Brothers, turned out extremely efficient. With some bricks recycled from the demolished houses on site the rest directly supplied from their own brickyards near Lowestoft,29 the station was spectacularly finished within two years. It had a most complex lattice truss roof of double nave, two aisles and transept, erected with three 80ft high scaffolding with 24 wheels, which cost five times as much as the single scaffolding used in St Pancras.30 Many referred to it as an ‘oversized extravagance’.31 It was quickly proven untrue. The complexity of the station only matched the company’ confidence in their technological capability: while the earlier companies planned their routes from London Bridge carefully to avoid even subtle changes in track level, the GER in 1874 didn’t hesitate to place their station below ground level and pulled their trains up the viaducts in Bethnal Green.

While Liverpool Street Station was under way, the urban condition in the City continued to deteriorate. By the 1870s, not only public opinion favoured slum-clearing, but the railway companies began to ‘seek credit for their role as improvers’32 As The Times commented, ‘You can never make these wretched alleys really habitable, do what you will, but bring a railway to them and the whole problem is solved.’33

Robert Thorne, ‘‘The Great Eastern Railway and its Metropolitan Schemes’’, in Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London: 1978), p.10.

26 Penelope Hunting, ‘‘Liverpool Street Station’’, in Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London: 1991), p.53.

27 Ibid, p.55.

28 Robert Thorne, ‘‘The Building of Liverpool Street’’, in Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London: 1978), p.27.

29 Ibid, p.28.

30 Ibid.

31 LNER, ‘‘A Brief History of the GER’’. <http://www.lner.info/co/GER/history.php> 32 Robert Thorne, ‘‘The Great Eastern Railway and its Metropolitan Schemes’’, in Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London: 1978), p.11.

33 Penelope Hunting, ‘‘Broad Street Station’’, in Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London: 1991), p.49.

25

Since 1865, GER started issuing notices to the properties needed for construction of the station between Liverpool Street and Hackney. It was estimated that it involved 450 houses holding up to 7,000 people:34 Out of those displaced from their houses, the most deprived could only squeeze into the neighbouring streets, to stay close to their jobs and customers while still eligible for parish charities. A small church was even opened for them in Finsbury Avenue, claimed to serve this ‘pocket of very poor, semi-criminal class’.35 Another 600 of the working-class tenants were rehoused in 10 purposed-built blocks in Bethnal Green, Spitalfields and Whitechapel. It was paid by GER before the demolition of their houses, though these relocations didn’t end up happily.36 Most importantly, however, GER managed to get away from rehousing most of the tenants evicted for its new station. Instead, when they moved out of the City, they were compensated with a discounted workmen’s ticket.

It was not a new idea by GER to offer a discounted return ticket for the working class to travel between his residence and the City. Popular since the 1850s, it was rather based on a belief that combined with model villages in the suburb, it would create an egalitarian ideal that the less fortunate could live a lifestyle just like their middleclass countrymen.37 Only later it was picked up by authorities as a remedy to the deteriorating urban slums.

The Bill for Liverpool Street Station in 1864 was issued conditional upon the provision of 4 daily workmen’s trains on GER’s suburban lines with a return fare of 2d.38 This coincided with the company’s strategic expansion of suburban service. GER had a quasi-monopoly over East Anglia, a region that had been least transformed by industrialization – its major industry was still agriculture produce, which made its freight traffic hardly profitable compared to those to Manchester or Liverpool. On the other hand, by 1862, east London’s suburb was still lightly inhabited. GER decided to continue the discounted fares started by ECR for suburban house-builders and residents to promote commuter traffic.39

It only became another problem when the workmen’s trains became too popular. In 1874, when the station was still partially under construction, the suburban traffic on the new lines were already growing. By 1883 GER was covering 32% of London’s workmen services operated by all companies.40 Three quarters of the station’s passengers held a workmen’s ticket. In 1890s the station had 52 workmen’s trains arriving every morning from as early as 3am.41 And finally, all-night services had to be started.

The problem was more than overcrowding, though passengers did get into guard’s vans. More seriously for the company, it lowered the profit generated per section of railway. GER’s 2d return ticket covered a distance that allowed passengers to travel 10¾ miles,42 further than any other company would do. These trains took up Penelope Hunting, ‘‘Liverpool Street Station’’, in Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London: 1991), p.54.

35 Ibid, p.60.

36 Robert Thorne, ‘‘The Building of Liverpool Street’’, in Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London: 1978), p.31.

37 Robert Thorne, ‘‘The Great Eastern Railway and its Metropolitan Schemes’’, in Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London: 1978), p.12.

38 Penelope Hunting, ‘‘Liverpool Street Station’’, in Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London: 1991), p.56.

39 Ibid.

40 Robert Thorne, ‘‘The Station and its Users’’, in Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London: 1978), p.45.

41 Penelope Hunting, ‘‘Redevelopment: Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station’’, in Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, (pub.

Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London: 1991), p.65.

42 Robert Thorne, ‘‘The Station and its Users’’, in Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London: 1978), p.45.

34

platforms and tracks that could have been used to run ordinary services – 1st and 2nd class carriages filled with better-off passengers, who could pay more for a single ticket. The Great Western Railway (GWR), for example, refused to provide any workmen’s service, for their lines ran through areas such as Richmond, and they were even afraid that the train might bring working-class population into the area.

However, the 1883 Cheap Trains Act further put duty on all companies to provide elemental workmen’s service. GER didn’t receive it happily. ‘We are not a philanthropic institution but a commercial company.’ the chairman told his shareholders.43 As a resistance, the company reserved two lines, from Seven Sisters to Palace Gates and from Leyton to Loughton, for ‘better traffic’; neither was any destination beyond Walthamstow covered by workmen’s ticket until 1925;44 in addition, some lines were simply not covered on a regular basis, i.e. not on all weekdays were the workmen’s tickets available, rendering the route useless for commuting.

Another intricate system for segregating different classes of passengers was developed in the timetable of train services. The Broad Street Station next door, run by North London Railway (NLR), had a clear distinction between weekday services for commuters and weekend services for excursionists to Hampstead Heath, which exhausted the usefulness of the same line for maximum traffic. GER only exaggerated this logic: on a weekday morning, the cheapest-ticket holders arrived at the station the earliest; from 7am were the printers, warehousemen and poor clerks who were offered half-price tickets; only after 9am the most affluent businessmen and professionals would arrive with a full-fare ticket.45 Of course all jobs in the City started at the same time, hence those who arrived early had to sleep on each other’s shoulders on the floor of the two big waiting rooms at the station46 – the same group of deprived people reunited in a sanitized version of their old City slum?

GER gradually developed a series of specialized services on their trains: in early 20th century, they became known for their Jazz service, with coloured strips marking different classes of carriages – yellow for 1st class and blue for 2nd;47 longer excursion journeys were promoted after employment dropped in Central London, combined with development of resort facilities on the east coast; GER was pioneer in bringing restaurant car onto most of its trains – those leaving Liverpool Street Station at tea time were offered food and service of outstanding quality.48

The specified commercial strategy allowed GER to gain maximized profit from different groups of passengers on single section of railway. The traffic at Liverpool Street Station almost doubled in the first 20 years since its opening. The station was soon extended with 8 more platforms. In 1903, 416 trains arrived daily at Liverpool Street Station, out of which 380 were suburban,49 making it the busiest railway terminus in London. When the traffic at Broad Street Station began to lost out in competition with trams and buses, GER’s Liverpool Street Station stood strong triumphantly till today.

The success of GER came as two-fold. On one hand, it was born with a quasi-monopoly over a large territory, which saved its effort from competition against rival companies, meanwhile its south London brothers were building four separate bridges across the Thames. On the other hand, its late birth made it natural to take lessons from the older companies’ bitter struggles. GER was a company prudent but hardly any inventive: most of

Ibid, p.47.

Ibid, p.51.

45 Penelope Hunting, ‘‘Liverpool Street Station’’, in Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London: 1991), p.56.

46 Robert Thorne, ‘‘The Station and its Users’’, in Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London: 1978), p.47.

47 Ibid, p.54.

48 LNER, ‘‘A Brief History of the GER’’. <http://www.lner.info/co/GER/history.php> 49 Robert Thorne, ‘‘The Building of Liverpool Street’’, in Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London: 1978), p.52.

43 44

its managerial techniques came from somewhere else; nor was it brave with new technologies – electric cars were only introduced as late as 1919, when they were finally needed for their expansion of outer-suburban traffic.50

The extension of Liverpool Street Station not only concluded an era of great railway construction, but it also terminated the City being residential area. Starting from London Bridge in 1836, every time a new station was built next to the City, a cycle of transformation ran through: houses were demolished for construction, reduced housing supply pushed up rent, more people crowded into streets, the station brought more traffic, shop premises rose in value… Gone together were institutions for residential communities – schools, churches, etc. Buildings were subsequently converted into factories, shops and warehouses, or simply replaced by viaducts. Eventually the City of London became a place of no residents, but only arrivals and departures.

At the same time, along GER’s rail line out of the City, a sequence of places were shaped with distinctive characters: the City as a place of work, clusters of East End slums from Shoreditch to Walthamstow, and the middle-class suburbs beyond such as Woodford/Romford. The station itself became the division point between the banking elites to its west and the working-class labour to its east.

The business of GER started facing a more working-class population than any other company did. From this difficult start, it had developed a most complicated ticketing system for itself to survive in a heartless capital market, which then contributed to the last round of social segregation of the railway era. It didn’t create the East End slums, but catalysed their splitting into sub-groups and moving eastward to Hackney and Tower Hamlets, but strictly not beyond.

Their local authorities might be reluctant to take such population. Nonetheless, this process was completed with the cooperation of private landlords, who promptly put up cheap houses to let and adjusted their rents to current ticket rates. The towns covered by GER’s workmen’s ticket, Leyton, Walthamstow and East Ham all saw significant population growth in late 19th century.51

50 51

Ibid, p.54.

Ibid, p.51.

3. Liverpool Street 1986 Since the beginning of 20th century, Broad Street Station, run by NLR, gradually lost out in the competition with buses, trams and underground by the cheap fares they offered. By 1983, the station’s daily passenger dropped to a mere 3,300, and only two platforms were in still use.52 It was undeniable that its future needed to be reconsidered.

Meanwhile, the Liverpool Street Station next door was suffering from overcrowding. Its full electrification since 1963 created more capacity for lower cost, but now the station and its platforms seemed too small. In 1975, the British Rail, who was in charge of both stations by then, started their redevelopment plan. After various controversies, the scheme finalized with a proposal that the Liverpool Street Station should be modernized without demolishing its historical building, and Broad Street Station and its goods yard, on the other hand, would be developed into 1,100,000 sqft of offices, whose selling would finance the scheme.53 Parliament consent arrived in 1983 and two years later, the Prime Minister, The Rt Hon Margaret Thatcher, launched its construction at Broadgate.

The following year, on 27 October 1986, a defining event of her political career happened. It is usually referred to as the ‘Big Bang’, when the country’s finance industry suddenly went through a whole package of radical reformation.

By then the industry was held up by a fraternity of old-school elites, who orchestrated the whole market ‘for the common good’ through a series of covert operations that would be redeemed completely illegal today.54 Their coordination was effective in stabilizing the market, but it also brought about scandals of exclusivity and conspiracy. Since US’s abolition of fixed commission in 1974, external climate had also urged reform. By 1986, the question was only if it should be gradualist or all at the same time.

It came out as the Big Bang, a sudden deregulation of the financial market. The reform essentially consisted of three parts: 1) removal of the fixed minimum commission fee, which introduced free competition between institutions based on best price offered; 2) removal of the division between brokers (agent advising and acting on behalf of clients) and jobbers (principals trading stocks and shares), who by then should be independent from each other and not belonging to a larger group; 3) removal of the exclusion of foreign companies from entering the UK market.55 Its transformation of the industry was immediate. More competition was encouraged with a lower entry requirement, which brought down the cost of trading. The American and European companies not only brought in huge amount of capital, but also their organizational model of ‘one-stop’ supermarket, i.e. businesses such as securities, insurance, money-dealing, etc. under one roof. Until then the traditional British firms were still divided by single function, and many of them merged through partnership to catch up with the international trend. The result, is London’s finance industry stepping from behind 20th century to the frontier of 21st century overnight.

Hence was changed the City’s financial geography. Before the reform, all banks in London were requested by the Bank of England to be located within 10 minutes’ walk from the governor’s office.56 This regulation was also Penelope Hunting, ‘‘Redevelopment: Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station’’, in Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, (pub.

Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London: 1991), p.65.

53 Ibid, p.67.

54 Harriet Agnew and Patrick Jenkins, ‘‘Big Bang II: After Brexit, what’s next for the City of London?’’, September 2016. <https://www.ft.com/content/bf2a2c16-6eb4-11e6-a0c9-1365ce54b926> 55 Nigel Lawson, ‘‘Foreword’’, in Big Bang 20 Years on: New Challenges facing the financial sector, (pub. Centre for Policy Studies.

London: 2006), p.ii.

56 Jamie Robertson, ‘‘How the Big Bang changed the City of London for ever’’, October 2016. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37751599> 52

removed when new authorities stepped into power. Banks could now have their offices located beyond the historical limit of the City.

But on top of that, new office space was required by the industry’s transformation: First, trading had shifted from face-to-face open cry in the old Chapel Court to electronic screens, and airconditioning became a norm of large offices, both of which required thicker floor plates for cables and ducts to go in between. Then the one-stop supermarket model of banking required large open-plan trading floors, which the City’s historical buildings couldn’t easily offer. Furthermore, more foreign companies entering the market simply meant more demand for space. And finally, while the volume of trade almost doubled within the first week of deregulation, the cost of trading went down57 — new offices must be cheaper as well.

There were limitations for the City to develop such offices. On one hand, its highly-subdivided leasehold meant that it had few large sites available. On the other hand, its historical buildings were not only unfit for new offices, but made up a huge part of conservation area, which further limited development.

In this light, the Broadgate Estates, built almost completely on underused railway land, seemed a smart option.

The 29-acre office development today stretches from the old Broad Street Station and its goods yard, extends along Bishopsgate over the eastern tracks of Liverpool Street Station, rises over its northern approach and finally reaches Worship Street to the north. When the two stations’ redevelopment plan was announced, developer Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments (RSD) grasped this opportunity and stood out in its competition with a cutting-edge proposal.

The innovation of the proposal featured construction with many pre-fabricated components, such as toilet pods, large cladding panels, air-conditioning facilities, and plantrooms. First built off site, they were then assembled into the steel frame structure of the buildings. The project’s engineering achievement culminated in the Exchange House, a 10-storey office block whose floor plates were hung from 4 full-length steel arches supported by 8 giant pillars on its edges, avoiding the railway tracks underneath that go into Liverpool Street Station.

The whole process was run under a cost-effective, quickly-built management, pushed by the director’s ‘cando’ spirit and 14-hour-a-day working schedule. As a result, the first building was duly erected before Mrs Thatcher returned in only a year for its inauguration.58 However, contrasting the buildings’ structural complexity was their formal simplicity. The developer requested ‘every part of the design to be questioned in order to ensure maximum value for money’, and expected designers to ‘actively seek to remove redundancy, excess equipment and over-design’.59 The prototype was 1 Finsbury Avenue, a midrise office block with large floor plates and atrium. The only design specification lied in the buildings’ street-facing façades and ‘public realm’, which was lined with a few shops and decorated with public art, as if only to please public opinion. It was properly justified when the media commented that all four buildings of its first phase were ‘essentially the same’.60 That didn’t stop them from being quickly taken by prominent tenants: UBS/Phillips and Drew, Lehman Brothers International, Security Pacific Hoare Govett, Mitsubishi Bank, etc.61 After all, the developer had Ibid.

Penelope Hunting, ‘‘Redevelopment: Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station’’, in Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, (pub.

Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London: 1991), p.70.

59 John Bennett and Colin Gray, ‘‘The Construction of Broadgate’’, in Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London: 1991), p.78.

60 Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc., ‘‘Press Comment’’, in Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London: 1991), p.101.

61 Penelope Hunting, ‘‘Redevelopment: Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station’’, in Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, (pub.

Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London: 1991), p.69.

57 58

commissioned space planning experts to interview 61 major City companies and delivered these simple boxes.62 Success soon led to a phase two of the development – another 10 office clocks with even larger floor plates. They were signed up quickly as well.

The immediate office boom was no guarantee that the City could stay unchallenged for ever as an international financial centre. Internally, its offices were already 3-5 times more expensive than anywhere else in London, and the cost of commuting was going high. Externally, private financial services were moving to the smart-posh area of Mayfair, and bigger office towers were under way in Canary Wharf with an appealing tax exemption. Not to mention that London constantly faced competition from Paris, Frankfurt, and Warsaw, who all aimed to be the new financial centre of Europe. After all, as communication technology continued to develop, banking could be done anywhere.

The 1986 City of London Local Plan was launched exactly for safeguarding the City’s position. Controls over new office buildings were relaxed, and the limitation of plot ratio at City Fringe was raised to 1:5.63 This led to a new wave of development including the Bishops Court in Spitalfields. Developers gained lower cost to build, tenants gained lower cost to rent – a 50% fall on unit space rent successfully made the City attractive again in price competition.64 A more powerful but heartless mechanism for the City to thrive as a commercial centre was the fact that it had almost no residents (8,100 residents compared to 401,000 City workers)65, thanks to both London Bridge and Liverpool Street stations who moved them away more than a century ago. In the 1970s, the Richard Rogers plan of 1 million sqft of offices on the site by National Theatre was stopped after public inquiry, for local residents favoured instead affordable housing and job opportunities appropriate to their skills.66 For similar reasons, many local authorities limited office development and gave priority to housing. The City of London Corporation, instead, clearly stated its protection of office accommodation in the Local Plan: not only would they refuse net loss of existing office blocks, but temporary use of vacant offices as housing is also strictly prohibited for its ‘adverse effect’.67

In this way, the City cleared its ground for the office boom. The Big Bang unbridled development in the financial sector at an unprecedented speed. As Lord Sterling, then a senior adviser in the Department of Trade and Industry, described: ‘Because of Big Bang, we will do in five years what would have taken us 25’.68 The time’s aspiration couldn’t be better represented than in the office blocks that proliferated over this period – nothing but only faster! Driven by the sudden influx of capital and potential tenants, the Broadgate Estate was not the only one of its time. Right next to it stood three new office blocks that belonged to the rival Greycoat Group. Passers-by would hardly tell this division, as they are, together with the first phase of Broadgate Estate and its prototype 1 Finsbury Avenue, all designed by the same architect – Peter Foggo of Arup Associates.69

Ibid.

Barnaby Lenon, ‘‘The geography of the 'Big Bang': London's office building boom’’, in Geography, Vol. 72, No. 1, January 1987, p.57.

64 Ibid.

65 The City of London Corporation, ‘‘Spatial Strategy, Vision and Strategic Objectives’’, in City of London Local Plan, (pub. The City of London Corporation. London: 2015), p.20.

66 Barnaby Lenon, ‘‘The geography of the 'Big Bang': London's office building boom’’, in Geography, Vol. 72, No. 1, January 1987, pp.57-58.

67 The City of London Corporation, ‘‘Delivery Strategy – A World Financial and Business Centre – 3.1 Offices’’, in City of London Local Plan, (pub. The City of London Corporation. London: 2015), pp.39-41.

68 Jamie Robertson, ‘‘How the Big Bang changed the City of London for ever’’, October 2016. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37751599> 69 Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc., ‘‘Press Comment’’, in Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station, (pub. Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London: 1991), p.103.

62 63

However, this proliferation of large office floor plates could only last when the capital inpour was robust, and in history it never happened for long. After the initial excitement, banks soon realized that they had overspent, and in the following years vulnerable firms like Vickers da Costa and Scrimgeour Kemp-Gee closed down.70 Into the 1990s and new millennium, simple office blocks could no longer suffice. On one hand, big firms like UBS had already moved into earlier development such as Broadgate Estates, if not Canary Wharf — the new City offices found it harder and harder to find tenants to sign up. On the other hand, when banks once and again endangered themselves in high-risk investments, the power of the financial ecosystem has gradually shifted to their clients – the asset management industry. New offices in the later stage had to offer more than low cost and high efficiency, but also an iconic identity for the branding of their tenants.

Hence we saw a new series of City towers going up into the sky: 30 St Mary Axe in 2001 (the Gherkin), the Willis Building by Norman Foster in 2004, 20 Fenchurch Street in 2009 (the Walkie-Talkie), 122 Leadenhall Street in 2010 (the Cheese Grater), etc. Each of them sought to be advertised by their own very presence – an eye-ballattracting form in London’s skyline, an easy-to-remember nickname in word of mouth. Collectively they make up the jungle of skyscrapers of City of London today, completely dwarfing the midrise blocks from previous years.

However, disguised under their extravagant contour and shiny glass skin, their content is not too different from that of the earliest Broadgate Estate – a simple extrusion of large open-plan floor plates.

Jamie Robertson, ‘‘How the Big Bang changed the City of London for ever’’, October 2016. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37751599> 70

4. London Bridge 2016 The other side of the river, London Bridge Station was getting more congested, shabby and confusing for its passengers in the 20th century. Despite its several refurbishments, its messing tracks and platforms never got properly detangled. From the 1960s on, activities in the London Bridge area also dropped following the decline of south bank‘s docks, as cargos gradually coming in containers could only arrive in deeper ports further to the east.

A turning point only came in the new century when the first Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, ambitiously pushed forward his London Plan, which encouraged high-density buildings near transport junctions.71 Entrepreneur-turned-developer Irvine Sellar seized this opportunity. Having started his business career from boutique shops in Carnaby Street, Sellar had both a ‘can-do’ spirit and 40 years’ experience in a neoliberal market of real-estate speculation. He saw a potential in the ‘unwanted and undervalued land’72 adjacent to the old station and bought the 1970s’ Southwark Tower as an investment. Though he had never been involved in buildings more than 3-storey’s high, he decisively demolished the obsolete office tower and replaced it with what he envisioned it should be – the London Bridge Tower, or now known as the Shard of Glass.

The Shard is the brain child of one developer, Sellar, meeting one architect, Renzo Piano, over lunch in a Berlin restaurant – the architect sketched on napkin, and it pretty much materialised into the skyscraper today.73 As in the redevelopment plan of Liverpool Street Station, profit from the Shard is used for the renovation of London Bridge Station. If 180 years ago the railway companies built the line and the private landlords built the houses, now the two projects finally became one – the scheme is titled ‘London Bridge Quarter’, where Sellar became an important partner with Network Rail. This inseparable relationship is shown not only in the Shard’s merely 48 parking lots for its staff, which makes it entirely reliant on public transport, but also its incorporation of the new station concourse and its public realm at its bottom.

This marked the Shard to be a new species, a complete departure from the Broadgate Estates and its variation office towers across the river.

This evolution was pushed first of all by its difficult birth time: over-supply of office space in the City had caused stagnancy in demand; rising speculation in housing market continued to absorb massive capital; and worst of all, in 2008, the financial crisis simply crashed all economic activities.

Neither was the physical location a privilege. London Bridge Station, unlike Liverpool Street, is not in the City, but London Borough of Southwark – not a prime location for any business. The area was once upon a time prosperous when the bridge was the only one across the river. Now it stands as one of the 35 crossings to north London, among them are bridges that carry railway tracks into Canon Street and Charing Cross, bringing passengers directly to East and West Ends. Then came City Thameslink to Blackfriars and Jubilee Line extension, which deliver passengers straight from the terminus to Westminster and Canary Wharf in only 4 and 6 minutes.

And even in this not-so-prime area, relatively large tenants, such as EY and PwC, were already taken by the More London Estates next door, a midrise office development built around 2000 in style of the Broadgate Estates.

Philip Jodidio, ‘‘London Bridge Tower’’, in Piano: Renzo Piano Building Workshop 1966 to today, (pub. Taschen. Koln: 2014), p.535.

72 Peter Buchanan, ‘‘London Bridge Tower’’, in Renzo Piano Building Workshop: complete works Vol.5, (pub. Phaidon Press.

London: 1993-), p.50.

73 Kenneth Powell, ‘‘Meet the Architect’’, in The Shard: the official guidebook, (pub. Thames & Hudson. London: 2013), p.19.

71

Therefore, the Shard has to be something different to thrive, if not to survive. Unlike the late City office towers, it is not a maximization of extruded floor plates – it is by nature not an office building at all.

Despite the its overwhelming appearance against the historical Borough High Street, the Shard has a much smaller footprint than its predecessor Southwark Tower, but only much taller and slenderer. Sitting on top of the new concourse, it is rather a vertical line leaving the ground of London Bridge Station.

As speculated by the developer, it is in fact ‘a vertical slice of city… where people live, work, enjoy themselves.’74 It is set up to run 24 hours, so that it will not be dead once the office workers leave at 6pm. From bottom up, it is composed of a retail arcade, a branch of local authority, a private hospital, multiple floors of offices, a university campus, 3 restaurants and bars, a luxurious hotel, a gym with swimming pool and spa, a dozen of prestige apartments and on the very top, a public viewing gallery with sky garden. This sequence is decided by the most efficient use of its floor plate area and the energy consumed for air conditioning.

Even the office in this vertical line evolved from its counterparts in the City. On Level 24 and 25 of the Shard is The Office Group (TOG), a new model of business that rents office space and sub-let to start-up companies and individuals. Their long list of products range from standard subdivided office rooms to reserved desk spaces for freelance individuals, from £50 per month lounge membership (equivalent to ticket into the building) to hourly paid use of meeting rooms. Among them on the list appears the virtual office, where the staff of TOG receive mails for their clients and redirect them to the addresses where their real offices are based75 – the virtual tenants could rent this premium address to brand their business without moving into the building.

On the other hand, it is also a vertical line from the same starting point where the first rail line of London reached out in 1836 to its suburbs. If someone takes a train on that line, he will come across the same sequence of the city. It couldn’t be surprising as the tower was designed by the architect to counteract urban sprawl.76 180 years apart, both the horizontal and vertical lines start from work and end with nature.

But this vertical line essentially resembles more GER’s rail line out of Liverpool Street Station. It is a vertical line of segregation.

Between the different components of the vertical city, nothing works better as spacer/separator than floor plates and plant levels. Each of these components has a separate entrance at the bottom, a uniformed doorman/door lady standing by to greet their guests and guide them through a metal detector gate. Entry to each is priced differently, and the security makes sure that nobody gets through the wrong entrance. Once inside, there is a lift programmed to go directly to the according levels. This lift has no button.

The Shard uses double-decker lifts. A backpacker tourist going to the viewing gallery enters from the west entrance. After buying his £35 ticket, he gets on the lift from Level 1 and gets off at Level 33 to change into another lift. A lady going to dinner in her evening dress enters from the south entrance. She takes the lift from Level 0 and gets off at Level 32 to go to the restaurant where her partner would pay £170 in the end for her Wagyu. They have nothing to do with each other, except that they are moving in the same vehicle in the same lift shaft at the same time. He is right on top of her. They are 3 meters apart. They will never meet each other.

How much does the double-decker lift resemble the train with different classes of carriages while the lift shaft resembles the tracks? A line of segregation going vertical to extract maximum value from single section of the line.

The different components of the vertical city each forms an exclusive interior that share nothing in common except the fact that they are wrapped in the same 8 sheets of glass – the image of the Shard.

Kenneth Powell, ‘‘Meet the Developer’’, in The Shard: the official guidebook, (pub. Thames & Hudson. London: 2013), p.15.

Introduction given by TOG staff.

76 Kenneth Powell, ‘‘Meet the Architect’’, in The Shard: the official guidebook, (pub. Thames & Hudson. London: 2013), p.19.

74 75

Like the late City office towers, the Shard has an iconic image to impress its potential clients. This nowfamous image could be seen from all around London except from Tooley Street, the street next to the railway station. Its immediate inner-city neighbours do not match its ambition. The Shard is the tallest building in Western Europe. It is destined to befriend Eiffel Tower and rival City of London.

To justify why this gigantic object is contextualized and appropriate to its site, architect Renzo Piano refers to two things as his inspiration for the shape of the Shard – ‘the spires that once dominated London’s skyline and the sails and tilting spars of the ships and barges that filled the Pool of London’.77 But if anyone remembers, that more than 100 years ago, it was exactly the philanthropic churches and busy docks on the south bank that acted as a magnet to the low-skilled manual workers, criminals and prostitutes, that turned the area into the congested urban slum in Dickens’ novels from which the middle-class City workers fled?

If some lived long enough, he would have recalled the smells and noises of the Victorian slum from the building’s sheer image.

21st century Londoners go up the Shard for they romanticized the reality of industrial London. Industrial Londoners went out of the city for they idealized the traditional English landscape – Southwark was London’s first suburb. In Roman times, there were substantial houses built for its prosperous citizens here. Remains of two of these villas were discovered at the foot of the Shard.78 Only the past could be new future.

Nonetheless, the office floors in the Shard are popularly pursued and the tenants’ businesses are reported to have grown since they moved in,79 even though their staff have to suffer the inconvenience of getting down to ground level every time before going they go to another part of the building, or maybe they don’t need to at all?

When the image of the Shard could be inhabited apart from its physicality, the office of 21st century becomes irrelevant to the open-plan floor plates it derived from. The Gherkins and Cheese Graters are left far behind, not to mention the original Broadgate Estates.

After 180 years, the frontier of the time comes back to London Bridge.

To get to the viewing gallery on top: after queueing half an hour outside the entrance, queueing half an hour inside the entrance, paying £35 for a ticket and passing through serious security check, the two lifts combined take 2 minutes to rise from Level 0 to Level 68, though 30 seconds are dedicated to waiting for the lower-deck to load. The lifts are extremely fast and quiet. Full of visitors inside. Nobody talks. A joyous music in background. The ceiling screen displays an animated 360-degree view of London.

The viewing gallery on Level 68, essentially a glass box, offers a real 360-degree view of London. A few steps up a tiny staircase, on Level 72, it is the Sky Garden, the highest point people could get to in London without a helicopter. The nature at the end of the vertical line is the size of a living room, a bit crowded, and simplistically made of three things: a carpet of grass (whether fake or not, it is good for high-heels), potted plants hanging from the building’s circulation core, and the sounds of birds singing coming out of hidden speakers. Overpriced cocktail bar doesn’t count.

The Sky Garden is open-air. Does anyone feel the air is cooler here than below, because of the height? Does anyone feel closer to the sky? Does anyone feel this air is different from what he breathes every day anywhere else in London?

Peter Buchanan, ‘‘London Bridge Tower’’, in Renzo Piano Building Workshop: complete works Vol.5, (pub. Phaidon Press.

London: 1993-), p.52.

78 Kenneth Powell, ‘‘Southwark: Roman to Modern’’, in The Shard: the official guidebook, (pub. Thames & Hudson. London: 2013), p.6.

79 The Shard Website. <http://www.the-shard.com/> 77

People from some cities may wonder why anyone would willingly pay £35 to go up a building that has only 72 floors.

But this is London. This is the highest point to have a view of this city. During the day, it is a view of greyish rooftops, a not-so-clear river and a close-up of tangling rail tracks – debatably beautiful, highly depending on weather. At night, it is an ocean of artificial lights, against a backdrop of unrecognizable blocks, glittering like the stars in the sky – definitely beautiful.

But that is not the point. The point is: without everything underneath, how does anyone know that he’s on top?

It feels so good.

The public space in the vertical city charges only £35.

5. Hegemony of the Line From London Bridge to Liverpool Street, from Broadgate Estates to the Shard, two economic cycles went through. In the end, the double-decker lift in the Shard ultimately resembles the trains going out of Liverpool Street Station, creating a sequence of distinctive places along the line that all relate to the City but have nothing to do with each other.

But did the double-decker lift start from Liverpool Street? No, it started from London Bridge in 1836, when LCR, LBR and SER couldn’t afford the cost of constructing their own viaduct and paid the toll for using LGR’s tracks and terminus into London. That started the precedence how the usefulness of a single section of line could be exhausted by being used by multiple parties.

This efficiency is further exaggerated when the lift shafts in different City office towers are combined into the single track of vertical movement in the Shard, a building whose floor area is too expensive to be used for circulation. We can boldly speculate that in the near future, there will be more than double-decker lifts, but also triple-decker lifts, multiple-decker lifts or even multiple lifts programmed to move in the same lift shaft. The first step is already achieved with the 2-lifts-in-1-shaft TWIN system developed by German lift company ThyssenKrupp.

However, the double-decker lift is not an invention by the Shard. It was brought to London as early as when Tower 42 was built in 1980, even before the Big Bang. The Shard is rather the one who used it to the fullest. By segregating their clients into sub-groups, they could charge them differently – the tourists going up to the viewing gallery with a £25 ticket are not necessarily those who stay in the Shangri-La Hotel for £475 per night.

Similarly, GER didn’t invent workmen’s ticket, but used it to the fullest to segregate its passenger groups.

They speculated on the middle class’ mentality that they were willing to pay a bit more to be separated from the working class, who didn’t have a choice but to buy whatever ticket they could afford. Exclusivity is what they sold – the company offered a series of spaces in transit that were compartment, specified and, most importantly, priced differently, just like the suburban houses put up by developers to target a certain clientele. The carriages are the houses on the go.

But a house, whatever building, never had this power to define such vast land of a whole city. The train is different from the house exactly because it’s mobile. It forms an exclusive and bespoke continuous interior of the city for the middle class, which overcomes geographical distance devoid of social contact. The skin of the carriages, just as the gates and walls of their suburban houses, define a continuous interior of a city that is their city and keeps all the ‘unwanted’ outside.

A project of such scale could only be achieved under centralized power. GER’s quasi-monopoly over East Anglia was critical in defining its line of places – their specification came from the company’s internal coordination in deciding which station should be what character. Between the earlier south London companies, such coordination was never achieved thanks to their competition against each other.

This lesson is also taken by the Shard – after 2008, the State of Qatar bought 80% of its stake.

It takes time to learn a lesson. From 1836 to 1874, from 1986 to 2016, both economic cycles started from deregulation-led development boom and ended with collapse of investment bubble. They are both an evolution from multiplicity to singularity, and from formal simplicity to programmatic complexity. This evolution has two strong drives: 1) Technological innovation: steam engine locomotives were first employed in London Bridge, but full maturation of railway construction was only achieved in Liverpool Street, where engineering

advancement fully conquered change in ground levels; electronic trading started in 1980s in the City, which generated office blocks with thick floor plates, but only in new millennium computer becomes a norm and necessity of office works; eventually digital systems took over everything, including the lift control system in the Shard, which coordinates between lift groups to put passengers to the same destination floors into the same carriage.

2) Development in managerial techniques: GER’s amalgamation was not only key in forming its quasi-monopoly over a large territory, but also gave it 1,200 miles of rail line readily laid and a relatively large financial base, thus it could afford to build a new station in the densely-populated City and all it needed to do was to extract maximum value out of these existing lines; the Shard was also planned in one go to have its different components of the city, not a maximization of floor area but destined to run 24 hours – profitable all the time!

But, had there not been London Bridge, will there be Liverpool Street? Had there not been the Broadgate Estates, will there be the Shard? Even if the latter ones could acquire the same technological innovation and managerial technique from somewhere else, the answer would probably be no.

From London Bridge in 1836, in almost 40 years, every time a new railway station was built next to the City, the more affluent City workers were moved out of the mixture of its demographics, and the more deprived were left behind. That is why the inner-city slums could only deteriorate throughout the process. That is why Liverpool Street Station, the last child of the railway era, was born facing an East-End working-class population. That is why GER had to run more workmen’s trains. That is why from the cheap services it had to run, the company developed a most complicated ticketing system. That is why along the line of segregation it created, there are no places like Dulwich, Hampstead or Richmond.

Similarly, RSD made an absolutely wise decision to develop the Broadgate Estates simply but quickly, at least from the perspective of a developer – the offices were soon taken by prominent tenants such as UBS and Royal Bank of Scotland. The More London Estates, also simple blocks developed around 2000 out of the falling docks of south bank, were let to EY and PwC – two of the Big Four accounting firms. The Shard next to it, arriving only post 2008, is not associated with such big names.

‘It is far less difficult to maintain pre-eminence than it is to achieve it,’ wrote Nigel Lawson, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1983-1989.80 In one economic cycle, the market punishes those who arrive late – they have to be much better to survive to the same standard.

From the very beginning, does it matter that London Bridge is London Bridge and Liverpool Street is Liverpool Street? Are they two different places or are they the same place under different names at different stages of capitalism development?

There is good reason that London Bridge is the first station. The small railway companies were weak and unexperienced at the beginning – the weak landownership and vast undeveloped nature in South London made an ideal testing ground, and in return the rail lines from London Bridge defined South London a homogenous middle-class residential area and left the City periphery even poorer. Liverpool Street, a more difficult site looking into East London, could only be developed by the railway company of next stage, the large corporate of GER, whose operation in return only reinforced the working-class character of East London.

Similarly, the difference between the stations defined the differences between the offices on top of them. The mature management and smooth services of Liverpool Street made it a preferable transport hub for developers to build on top first. The early office development is no different to that of the early railway, all about timely wild amplification to grasp as much land as possible and best clientele out of the pot. On the other hand, the oldest Nigel Lawson, ‘‘Foreword’’, in Big Bang 20 Years on: New Challenges facing the financial sector, (pub. Centre for Policy Studies.

London: 2006), p.v.

80

station of London Bridge is also the least efficient transport junction due to its humbled beginnings. The Shard could only come about when the traffic is detangled underneath, and by that time it has the best technology but no good tenants.

Everything seems to matter a bit, the soil condition of North and South London, the historical fact that the Roman City was located on the north of Thames and Southwark was its suburb, and most importantly, the time line along which everything seems reasonable. If we return to any point in history, we would have made the same decision.

‘… place became subordinated to space, and both to time, in the seventeenth century.’ Explained Agnew on the project of a ‘spatial history’.81 If there is a line that has absolute hegemony over the world, it must be the line of time – the irreversible, mono-directional progression of history that is ultimately both linear and cyclic.

Moore's law, which predicted that technology would advance regardless of human endeavour, was proved valid for several decades. If that is too mythical, then the wheel of history is pushed collectively by a middle-class majority of the society, who have invested their savings to become shareholders and expect the railway companies/developers to return a dividend. In contemporary terms, that is every individual who owns a bank card and doesn’t expect to see a net loss in his account.

We can only go forward. There is no way back.

To add a happy ending to this rather heartless story: Although from a developer’s point of view, the Broadgate Estates might be more successful than the Shard, to an architect that might be the opposite.

Recently there has been pessimism in architecture again that we are going to end up with homogenous cities of simple extrusion of floor plates that sell only by square meters – there will be no need of architect any more.

This ‘dystopia’ is typically described by Koolhaas in his ‘Generic City’, and the blame is usually laid on the evil nature of capitalism. However, Koolhaas wrote this text in the 1990s. This timing is in the beginning of a new economic cycle thus only allowed him to foresee the coming of the Gherkins and Cheese Graters, but not that of the Shard and his own CCTV Headquarter, both a complex city in the form of skyscrapers.

Is the more developed architecture more likely to survive into the next economic cycle? We don’t know what will happen in the future. Capitalism is always evil. But we should be a bit more optimistic about architecture – instead of asking if an architect is needed at all, maybe we should ask: when is an architect needed?

81

John Agnew, ‘‘Space and Place’’, in The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge, (pub. Sage. London: 2011), Chapter 23.

Bibliography Agnew, Harriet and Jenkins, Patrick: Big Bang II: After Brexit, what’s next for the City of London? September 2016. <https://www.ft.com/content/bf2a2c16-6eb4-11e6-a0c9-1365ce54b926> Agnew, John: Space and Place. The SAGE Handbook of Geographical Knowledge. Sage. London, 2011.

Bennett, John and Gray, Colin: The Construction of Broadgate. Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station. Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London, 1991.

Buchanan, Peter: London Bridge Tower. Renzo Piano Building Workshop: complete works Vol.5. Phaidon Press.

London, 1993.

Course, Edwin: Central London. London’s Railways: then & now. B.T. Batsford Ltd. London, 1987.

Davies, R. and Grant, M.D.: Main Lines. London and Its Railways. David & Charles Limited. Devon, 1983.

Davies, R. and Grant, M.D.: Termini. London and Its Railways. David & Charles Limited. Devon, 1983.

Derbyshire, Nick: The 1875 Station. Liverpool Street: a station for the twenty-first century. Granta Editions. Cambridge, 1991.

GER Society: The Great Eastern Railway, its Predecessors and Successors. <https://www.gersociety.org.uk/index.php/information/the-ger> Gordon, W. J.: London’s First Railways. Our Home Railways: How they began and how they are worked. Frederick Warne.

London, 1910.

Grace’s Guide: Great Eastern Railway. <http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Great_Eastern_Railway> Holman, Printz Peter.: Introduction. The Amazing Electric Tube: A History of the City and South London Railway.

London Transport Museum. London, 1990.

Ideal Homes: History of Dulwich. <http://www.ideal-homes.org.uk/southwark/assets/histories/dulwich> Ideal Homes: St George's Fields, Southwark: From a grand 18th century suburb to 19th century inner-city slums. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37751599> Hunting, Penelope: Broad Street Station. Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station. Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London, 1991.

Hunting, Penelope: Liverpool Street Station. Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station. Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London, 1991.

Hunting, Penelope: Redevelopment: Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station. Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station.

Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London, 1991.

Jodidio, Philip: London Bridge Tower. Piano: Renzo Piano Building Workshop 1966 to today. Taschen. Koln, 2014.

Koolhaas, Rem: Generic City. S, M, L, XL: small, medium, large, extra-large. Monacelli Press. New York, 1995.

Lawson, Nigel: Foreword. Big Bang 20 Years on: New Challenges facing the financial sector. Centre for Policy Studies.

London, 2006.

Lenon, Barnaby: The geography of the 'Big Bang': London's office building boom. Geography, Vol. 72, No. 1.

January 1987.

LNER: A Brief History of the GER. <http://www.lner.info/co/GER/history.php>

LNER: History of the GER's Constituent Companies. <http://www.lner.info/co/GER/prehistory.php> Powell, Kenneth: Meet the Architect. The Shard: the official guidebook. Thames & Hudson. London, 2013.

Powell, Kenneth: Meet the Developer. The Shard: the official guidebook. Thames & Hudson. London, 2013.

OMEGA Centre: Jubilee Line Extension (JLE). <http://www.omegacentre.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/wpcontent/uploads/2014/12/UK_JLE_PROFILE.pdf> Railway Mania: Narrative. <http://www.railwaymania.co.uk/narrative.html> Robertson, Jamie: How the Big Bang changed the City of London for ever. October 2016. <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37751599> Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc.: Press Comment. Broadgate and Liverpool Street Station. Rosehaugh Stanhope Developments plc. London, 1991.

The City of London Corporation: Delivery Strategy â&#x20AC;&#x201C; A World Financial and Business Centre â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 3.1 Offices. City of London Local Plan. The City of London Corporation. London, 2015.

The City of London Corporation: Spatial Strategy, Vision and Strategic Objectives. City of London Local Plan. The City of London Corporation. London, 2015.

Thorne, Robert: Conclusion. Liverpool Street Station. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London, 1978.

Thorne, Robert: The Building of Liverpool Street. Liverpool Street Station. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London, 1978.

Thorne, Robert: The Great Eastern Railway and its Metropolitan Schemes. Liverpool Street Station. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London, 1978.

Thorne, Robert: The Station and its Users. Liverpool Street Station. Academy Editions (for) the Greater London Council. London, 1978.

Turner, John Howard: New Lines to Sutton, Epsom Downs, and Wimbledon (1862-1871). Brighton and South Coast Railway: 2. Establishment & Growth. Batsford. London, 1977.

Turner, John Howard: The First Years of the Croydon and Brighton Companies. Brighton and South Coast Railway: 1. Origins and Formation: Origins and Foundations. Batsford. London, 1977.

Turner, John Howard: The Opening of the South Eastern Railway and its Effects, 1842-44. Brighton and South Coast Railway: 1. Origins and Formation: Origins and Foundations. Batsford. London, 1977.

Wolmar, Christian: Changing Britain. Fire & Steam: A History of the Railways in Britain. Alec Tiranti, Ltd. London, 2008.

Wolmar, Christian: Midwife to the Underground. The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground Was Built and How it Changed the City Forever. Atlantic Books. London, 2004.

Wolmar, Christian: Railways Everywhere. Fire & Steam: A History of the Railways in Britain. Alec Tiranti, Ltd. London, 2008.