Half a century later, Centre Point is still ‘coarse in the extreme’

Centre Point … still a landmark building in London after half a century (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

When I began training as a chartered surveyor after I left school, one of the modern wonders of the property developers’ word was Centre Point, a large, multi-storey office block that stood empty for years.

It was controversial even then, when it was seen as being brash and crude. It featured on television programme and on the cover of book, and half a century ago it was at the heart of many protests that were closer to my heart then than the training was going through with a large property company and the College of Estate Management at Reading University.

Yet Centre Point was held up as an object lesson to my generation of the ‘build-em-high’ approach in the property world at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, and Harry Hyams, its developer, was held up as an innovative, entrepreneurial developer who managed to build up his portfolio and amass his wealth with a minimal staff.

Harry Hyams (1928-2015) made much of his fortune developing office space in London in the 1960s and 1970s when rents there were rising significantly. He preferred to find single, blue-chip tenants for his properties, having them fully repair and insure the buildings they occupied.

This approach allowed him to manage a valuable and sizable property business with a staff of just six. He also used that as justification for keeping Centre Point empty for years after it was completed, claiming he could find no tenant willing to lease all the space.

The negative reactions created by Centre Point were in sharp contrast to the positive acceptance of the nearby Post Office Tower (now the BT Tower), with its revolving restaurant.

All these memories came back in London last week as I walked back to the St Giles Hotel in Bloomsbury from Westminster, along Whitehall and Charing Cross Road, and found myself in front of Centre Point at 101-103 New Oxford Street and 5-24 St Giles High Street. It also has a frontage to Charing Cross Road, close to St Giles Circus and is almost directly above Tottenham Court Road Underground station.

Centre Point was built between 1963 and 1966 as speculative office space by the property tycoon Harry Hyams, who leased the site at £18,500 a year for 150 years.

This was one of the first skyscrapers in London. It is a 33-storey tower, with 27,180 sq metres of floor space. A nine-storey block beside it has shops, offices, retail units and maisonettes, and there is a linking block between the two at first-floor level.

The building was designed by George Marsh of the architects R Seifert and Partners, and was built by Wimpey Construction for £5.5 million.

Hyams wanted one single tenant for the whole building. Because he was a tough negotiator, the building remained vacant for many years after its completion in 1966.

Property prices were rising at the time, and most business tenancies involved leases for set periods of 10 or 15 years. Hyams could afford to keep Centre Point empty and wait for his single tenant at his asking price of £1.25 million. He was challenged to allow tenants to rent single floors, but consistently refused.

Because it was vacant for so long, it became known as ‘London’s Empty Skyscraper.’ Skyscrapers were rare in London, and Centre Point became a focus for protests in London.

The homeless charity Centrepoint was founded in 1969 as a homeless shelter in nearby Soho, and named Centrepoint in response to Centre Point being seen as an affront to the homeless because it had been left empty as Harry Hyams saw the value of his property portfolio increase.

An umbrella group of Direct Action housing campaigners, including Jim Radford, Ron Bailey and Jack Dromey, organised a weekend occupation of Centre Point from 18 to 20 January 1974 to draw to the housing crisis in London as Centre Point remained vacant.

Eventually tenants were found in 1975. From 1980 to 2014, Centre Point was the headquarters of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI).

Centre Point was bought in 2005 by the commercial property firm Targetfollow for £85 million, and was extensively refurbished. The tenants included the US talent agency William Morris, the Saudi state-owned national oil company Aramco, the Chinese oil company Petrochina, and electronic gaming company EA Games.

Although Centre Point became a Grade II listed building in 1995, and won the Concrete Society’s Mature Structures Award in 2009, it was never really a pretty site. Perhaps the iron is not lost that the site was once occupied by a gallows.

A promised transport link never materialised, the pedestrian subway attracted anti-social activities, the building was cited as an example of bad design, badly-designed pavements were forcing e pedestrians into the bus lane and reports pointed to the highest level of pedestrian injuries in Central London.

Recently, it was bought by Almacantar, and was converted from office space to luxury flats in 2015 by Conran and Partners.

As I looked up at Centre Point that grey and wet afternoon last week, I had to agree with England’s greatest architectural historian and critic, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, who once described Centre Point as ‘coarse in the extreme.’

Working my way through ‘Limerick in 50 Buildings’

No 17 The Crescent … one of 50 buildings included in Pat Dargan’s new book on Limerick (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

Patrick Comerford

Since moving to West Limerick at the beginning of 2017, I have enjoyed my regular trips into Limerick, not only to take part in events in Saint Mary’s Cathedral, and not merely to catch trains or buses to Dublin.

As a city, Limerick has an interesting history that dates back to the arrival of the Vikings on the Shannon estuary. After a brief period in the hands of the O’Briens, Kings of Thomond, Limerick passed to the Anglo-Normans in the late 12th century and later was fought over during the many civil wars in the 17th century.

Limerick’s Gothic Saint Mary’s Cathedral, the Norman-era King John’s Castle, and the city’s walls and defences have survived since the mediaeval era. But much of the architectural fabric of the city centre dates from the Georgian and Victorian eras, when the Pery and Barrington families were involved in laying out a new street plan with elegant houses lining the parallel streets and squares.

As I walk around the mediaeval quarter on King’s Island and the Georgian and Victorian streets and squares, I keep my eyes up, watching for what intrigues me, photographing it, and then researching it before I blog about it.

Now I have a new guidebook to Limerick’s streets and buildings.

Dr Pat Dargan is an architect and planner who has lectured in the Technological University Dublin from many ages. He has a special interest in the history and development of towns and villages.

He has published books on the architectural heritage of Dublin, Bath, and London and on the Georgian buildings in his native Limerick.

Now he has produced a new book, Limerick in 50 Buildings in a series published by Amberley Books. Three years ago, my friend the Lichfield blogger wrote a similar book in this series, Lichfield in 50 Buildings.

Pat Dargan’s selection includes imposing Georgian public buildings, extensive Victorian religious and industrial buildings, the city’s museums, including the Hunt Museum and Frank McCourt Museum, and its modern architecture all reflect a dynamic local history.

The former Leamy School on Hartstonge Street (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2019)

He begins with Kilrush Old Church, on Old Church Street, near Villiers School and said to be the oldest building in Limerick, and ends with the Clayton Hotel on the Quays, one of the most striking buildings visually on the quays.

In between, the selection is captivating. He includes churches, castles and courthouses, ruins and modern structures.

I have already blogged about many of these buildings. Inevitably, when it comes to choices, there are some I might have selected that are not here – such as the former Jesuit church on the Crescent; and there are others that are here that I might not have thought about or have yet to see.

One way he caught my imagination was the inclusion of No 17 The Crescent, which is his No 24 in his selection, right in the middle of the book. This house is typical of the 600 or so Georgian townhouses in Newtown Pery, although it is positioned in the curve of the Crescent.

Limerick in 50 Buildings explores the history of this city and the changes that have taken place in Limerick over the centuries. A small quibble is the spelling of some of the street names on the map, and the map location for O’Connell Street. But this is a book that I plan to take with me again and again as I wander through the city streets.

Pat Dargan, Limerick in 50 Buildings (Stroud: Amberley, 2019, paperback, ISBN: 9781445691237, €17.99)

The Clayton Hotel, Pat Dargan’s choice No 50 in ‘Limerick in 50 Buildings (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)