The £1 billion Pinnacle skyscraper on Bishopsgate, which had its ascent into the London skyline arrested at the seventh floor last year after the developer failed to pre-let enough office space, could be scrapped and re-built from the ground up as an 'austerity tower', according to trade magazine Building.
A new developer, Lipton Rogers, is proposing to knock down the concrete husk and start anew, with a fresh, not to mention cheaper, design, one that, according to the magazine's sources, would be "significantly different to the existing spiralling design".
We're not entirely sure what an 'austerity tower' would look like, but we imagine (indeed, hope) that it might be a monolithic grey block topped with a bust of a sombre-faced George Osborne, possibly modelled on this one of Turkmenistan's former leader Saparmurat Niyazov. Or perhaps it will take the form of a series of declining zig-zags resembling Britain's growth figures in the age of austerity.
In other 'scraper news, on the day that the Shard's viewing gallery opens to the public today, the building's developer Irvine Sellar claims that he has signed up a number of tenants, and is hopeful that deals to take over a fifth of the office space will be completed by April.