The Merry Month: Low down in a high rise
Robert Merry is an independent stone consultant and project manager who ran his own company for 17 years. He also acts as an expert witness. Here he presents his view of the stone industry this month.
I’m working in a basement – the lower ground basement, to be precise – in the middle of London’s West End in one of those new developments that incorporates some of the existing Victorian buildings and weaves in a series of tower blocks.
There is commercial space beneath for restaurants and shops, a gym and private parking in the lower ground, where I am – unfortunately not yet among the Ferraris and Porche Carreras.
It’s a marble subcontractor’s office. It’s small and sits among rows of other subcontractors’ offices. I am project managing the QA system for the handover of the bathrooms.
In the private apartments above, the bathrooms are all covered in marble, which is good for me and great for the interior stone industry. Even better news is that there are 263 more tower blocks planned for London, 80% of them residential. There are 70 being built at the moment with another 76 in planning. There are 117 with planning permission but not on site yet, according to the annual London Tall Buildings Survey.
You see, there are so many of them they need a survey.
Just imagine the number of bathrooms, kitchens and common areas that need marble, granite and limestone?
This is a planned approach by the Greater London Authority (GLA) to deal with the predicted expansion of London from its current high of 8.5million residents to more than 10million by 2030. The GLA plans ‘clusters’ of tower blocks, according to Deputy Mayor Edward Lister.
Birmingham, on the other hand, has been spending £26million pounds on demolishing its tower blocks to replace them with lower level residential housing. Granted, these are 1960s tower blocks, built in the heyday of the concrete panel system (LPS) and designed to alleviate a housing crisis, not to mention the unsanitary conditions of Victorian tenements. They became popular with housing authorities across Britain – famously Glasgow’s Gorbels and Sighthill districts, London’s Bow quarter, Hunslet Grange in Leeds and Sheffield’s Park Hill Estate. There are more.
This was the new council housing stock. With poor management and shocking maintenance – lifts broke down regularly and shared heating systems failed in the depths of winter – they became places of isolation. Truly brutal. I know. I lived in one on the Isle of Dogs for 12 years.
Then came Ronan Point – a gas explosion and partial collapse. All eyes were on concrete construction (LPS) tower blocks. People started to focus on the human suffering of streets in the sky – or ‘slums in the sky’ as they became known. These buildings weren’t suitable for families. There was nowhere for the kids to play, only dark corridors and oppressive concrete street corners to hang around on.
But even though Birmingham is pulling its tower blocks down, it is also building new ones, with better materials. Many other cities are doing the same, albeit not on the same scale as London.
So there will be plenty of marble bathrooms, I guess, because the majority of the apartments are aimed at young professionals. They want great views in great locations and are willing to pay great sums of money to get them. In the place I’m working prices range between £750K for a studio apartment and £12.5million for a penthouse.
Long before they invade our sky line they are bought as investments and sold off-plan in sales campaigns conducted all over the world.
But I can’t help asking where all the people who build the tower blocks are meant to live. And where are all the houses for people to bring-up children to build the next generation of dwellings? Even the young professionals become older and have families.
There are 50-odd ‘affordable’ apartments in my development. This represents 20% of the total. At £300K plus, how affordable is that for the average worker in London? Perhaps if they save very hard…
I am thankful there is so much construction and that we are all in work for another 263 tower blocks worth of marble bathrooms and entrances.
But I am concerned about what we will be left with in our cities. I hope we won’t be looking back in 50 years and asking why we built all these luxury flats and left nowhere for the average person to live and raise a family.