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‘One of the most well-crafted buildings the City has seen for some time’ … Fen Court.
‘One of the most well-crafted buildings the City has seen for some time’ … Fen Court. Photograph: Dirk Lindner
‘One of the most well-crafted buildings the City has seen for some time’ … Fen Court. Photograph: Dirk Lindner

Fen Court review – a candy-striped miracle in the central London skies

This article is more than 5 years old

Squeezed amid the City’s garish landmarks is a glorious, free-to-enter roof garden borne of public-private dealmaking … so what’s the catch?

Sometimes the planning system just works. The untrammelled interests of global capital come up against a set of rules designed to ensure maximum public benefit, and something better is spawned in the process. The bounty is usually so small as to be negligible. Perhaps a few apartments will be marginally less overpriced, and called “affordable”, or there will be a tiny garnish of lawn, labelled on the plans as “park”. Which makes what has happened at Fen Court, a new office block on Fenchurch Street in the City of London, all the more remarkable.

As a member of the public, you can now sit on a bench beneath a bower of wisteria 15 storeys up in the air, or eat your sandwiches next to a little pond while suspended among the rooftops of the Square Mile. The gothic space-rockets of Tower Bridge rise to the south, while the mad bulge of the Walkie Talkie looms to the west, along with the gleaming pipes and rooftop cranes of the Lloyd’s building and the dome of St Paul’s beyond.

Fen Court’s roof garden alongside the ‘Walkie Talkie’. Photograph: Dirk Lindner

It is one of the most exhilarating vantage points in central London, made all the more so because you are in among it all. From the top of the Shard (reachable for £27) London looks like a puny train set. In the Walkie Talkie’s Sky Garden (accessible via advanced reservation), you’re surrounded by expensive dining concepts and too much steel. But on the York stone paving of Fen Court’s roof, you’re in the open air with a 360-degree panorama on a terrace the size of eight tennis courts. If it wasn’t for the security guard waiting by the elevator, you would be forgiven for thinking this was an Actual Public Space.

In truth, it is as close to being public as the roof of any private building can get. No reservation is needed, no purchase must be made and even photographers with tripods are welcome. It’s simply first come, first served (capped at 200 capacity), with the usual brief bag-check before getting in the lift. But this result didn’t come easy.

“It was a very difficult journey,” says architect Eric Parry, who has brokered his fair share of deals as the middle man between powerful clients and the City of London’s planners – including winning permission for the tallest (as yet unbuilt) tower of the bunch, 1 Undershaft. When he was first hired for the Fen Court project by Generali Real Estate, in 2006, he proposed a tower of a similar height to the Walkie Talkie. Despite that now-notorious building being given permission a few doors down, the then chief planner, Peter Rees, decided this was not the spot to go tall. The site was earmarked to be one of the “foothills” of the emerging cluster of towers to the north, a lesser peak in the City’s mangled mountain range of steel and glass.

The scheme was cut down to two smaller towers, with an atrium between, then compressed further, following the 2008 financial crisis, into an 11-storey block topped with a four-storey glass “crown” – the additional floors allowed in exchange for the public roof garden.

The building’s shimmering two-tone exterior. Photograph: Dirk Lindner

“We thought the building was uncomfortably high for the site,” Rees recalled in a recent Parry monograph. “What was there to compensate for this? A park on the roof … and open space, plus extra room for pedestrian movement through the City.”

For once, the Faustian quid pro quo has produced a happy result for both parties. The exposed steel pergolas on the roof might feel a little stark, but they will soon be covered with a magnificent violet canopy by the 80 wisteria trees. At ground level, there is a generous route through the site, preserving an ancient right of way in the form of Hogarth Court, a two-storey volume roofed with a huge LED screen that displays a live feed of the view from the roof, interspersed with video art inspired by the changing seasons. One minute you’re under a vast oak tree canopy, the next beneath a sheet of rippling water, or seeing boats glide below Tower Bridge through this digital camera obscura.

It is a surreal encounter that fits with the jaunty gait of the rest of the building. Parry has form in persuading his clients to let rip, from the garish ceramic friezes at One Eagle Place on Piccadilly, complete with crimson-spattered tiles around its windows, to the mural-painted balconies of his apartment block in Stratford’s Olympic village, which make it look like the residents all decided to hang out their jazzy beach towels at once. The results often sail close to the limits of good taste, and Fen Court is no exception.

The handsome facade of white ceramic mullions is interlaced with layers of horizontal louvres painted in what the architects describe as “Essex hot-rod paint”, variously shimmering in boy-racer two-tone shades of purple-green and red-gold. It sounds like an eyeful, but the effect is quite subtle, and the shock of colour makes a refreshing change from the acres of grey-green glass nearby.

The “crown”, meanwhile, is where Parry’s psychedelic penchant is really unleashed, seeing the faceted glass walls clad with stripes of dichroic film, reflecting a shimmering rainbow of pinks, blues and greens. It is a fine sight to glimpse from one of the City’s narrow alleyways, although it has the unexpected side-effect of bathing its neighbours in a sickly green tinge, as if they’re in the firing sights of the Mysterons (less malevolent, at least, than the Walkie Talkie’s death ray). Inside the offices, meanwhile, the result looks more extreme than expected, where the dichroic glass casts lurid pink candy stripes across the floor. It might be a fun feature for the uppermost restaurant level, but one wonders how long it will be, for the employees of chief tenant M&G Investments, before the novelty of a rose-tinted workplace wears off.

Panoramic views … Fen Court. Photograph: Dirk Lindner

Nonetheless, Fen Court is one of the most well-crafted buildings the City has seen for some time, and the generosity of its roof garden marks a welcome shift in the balance of private interest and public gain. Half of the 14 forthcoming towers in the City are slated to have free public viewing galleries of various kinds, a long-held ambition that is soon set to be cemented in planning policy. The new draft City Plan 2036, open for consultation until the end of February, states that “the provision of free-to-enter, publicly accessible areas will be required as part of all tall building developments”. It is up to the planners to insist that these new public eyries are as open and accessible as Parry’s pink-blossomed park in the clouds.

More on this story

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