Allies and Morrison Architects have designed this trio of towers to sit on the Southbank behind the Shell Centre for P&O Estates and Morgan Stanley Real Estate.
The site next to York Road is currently occupied by the sixties slab, Elizabeth House, and for an area directly outside one of London’s busiest stations is shockingly bad.
Much is made of the ground level improvements that the redevelopment will offer including new pedestrianised areas that will help make it less of an embarrassment.
The two most eastern buildings will be offices with retail on the ground floors with the western building serving as a new apartment block with 280 flats.
The tower designs however are hardly imaginative with blandness being the order of the day.
With the news that they were actually reduced in height by up to 21 floors and bulked out to make up for the potential loss in accommodation, Londonist can’t help but shake it’s collective head at how the planning rules could leave us with a wall of slab blocks rather than something more graceful and varied befitting the cultural zing of the South Bank.
By James Newman
