Peter Rees Skyscraper Legacy & Keeping Residential Developments Out of the City

Peter Wynne Rees, recently retired, was the City of London's chief planner since 1985.

Peter Rees is now a Professor at University College London

Cheese Grater, the Scalpel, and the Can of Ham
Rees, a Welsh-born architect who has held the planning job for 27 years, leaves his most visible and controversial legacy - the skyscrapers that have been sprouting up around the City—a cluster of towers with nicknames like the Cheese Grater (The Leadenhall Building), the Scalpel (52 Lime Street), the Can of Ham (60-70 St Mary Ave) and the infamous Walkie Talkie (20 Fenchurch Street)

People Go To The City To Gossip
Rees argued that the skyscrapers he has approved in the City are clustered, to minimize their impact on the skyline. More importantly, their point isn’t to show off, but to meet the needs of financial service firms for close proximity. “People could do most of their jobs from home. The reason they come to the City,” he says, “is to be near each other, which allows for the gossip, the stuff that nobody would dream of saying over the phone or in an email.”

Not All Buildings Are Loved
One tower now under construction, by New York architect Rafael Viñoly, has come in for particular criticism. To make larger office spaces available on the higher floors, it gets bigger as it rises, which makes it appear to be crowding its neighbors.

But Rees thinks it’s a good sign that Londoners, noting the building’s shape, have begun calling it the Walkie-Talkie. Rees not only doesn’t mind the buildings’ nicknames, he encourages them, and in several cases, takes credit for them. (The Cheese Grater, he says, came to him when he imagined the architect’s wife, Ruth Rogers, in the kitchen of her celebrated restaurant the River Café.) Nicknames are a sign that the public embraces the buildings. “If you don’t have a nickname at your pub, you’re nobody,” says Rees.

Encouraging Pubs To Stay Open
When Rees took the job, pubs closed at 8 p.m. “Now you have a choice of clubs ‘till the wee hours.” That helps to attract the highly-skilled and mobile 20-somethings who could be working in New York, Hong Kong, or Dubai, and will go wherever there’s the most fun to be had.

Best Free Sex In The World!
Right now, Rees says, the city that offers that is London. (At one conference in New York, he shocked button-downed city planners by announcing that London’s appeal is that it offers “the best free sex in the world.”) As planner, his job is to keep the party going.

Say 'NO' to Residential Developments - Keep the NIMBYs Out
But he doesn’t want to see the City become a residential enclave, which in his view would create a class of NIMBYs— “not in my backyard” complainers—who would stand in the way of the future growth that businesses require. For the same reason he believes New York will rue the day it began encouraging residential development in its financial district.

There have been a few condo developments in the City (and Rees, a renter most of his life, plans to move into one of them to be close to his office in the historic Guild Hall), but he says he is working to tighten the rules against future residential development, to ensure that the City remains viable as a business district. “The current residential property boom in London,” he says, “is everywhere but in the City.” And he hopes to keep it that way.

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