Skyscrapers in London have traditionally been built in clusters, with entire neighbourhoods including only a few buildings of eight or ten storeys or more. The West End is one of them, and Centre Point has been a prominent landmark between Shaftesbury Avenue and Tottenham Court Road for nearly fifty years. When it was finished being constructed in 1963, it was London’s tallest skyscraper at the time.
Center Point was a lonely hilltop surrounded by residences that were rather low, and many people thought it was unsightly.
Harry Hyams, who was a building contractor at the time, was able to persuade the municipality to release the permit to build a building of almost 120 metres, and he only managed to rent the land for 150 years for just £ 18,000 a year, which is a price that is now very rare for a piece of land in central London. This allowed him to build a building that is still standing today and is almost 120 metres tall.
He decided to commission the work to be designed by the famous architect Richard Seifert. The issue, though, was that after it was finished, nobody was interested in renting the area, which was around 200 square metres. Instead of renting out the Centre Point for a lower price, Hyams decided to let it sit unused for the next 15 years. In point of fact, he desired to lease the entire building to a single tenant as opposed to subleasing to a number of separate tenants.
The past of London’s Centre Point and its significance in the city
It should not come as a surprise that squatters moved into Centre Point in 1974 because the palace was considered by many people to be a monstrous structure, and during the 1970s, when there were no houses, it was viewed as a symbol of waste and poor building policy. Because of this, there were no houses.
Finally, in 1980, the building was rented, and from that year until 2014, it served as the home of the CBI It was sold in 2004, and beginning in the years that followed, beginning in 2015, work began to convert it from an office building into a structure that houses upscale apartments.
It is now a protected building and is not thought of as being quite so hideous as it once was. As is the case with the majority of brutalist architecture built in the 1960s and 1970s, it is currently admired by a sizeable number of people.
You can observe the significant impact that Architect Seifert had on London’s development even now, since he was one of the most important architects involved in the reconstruction of London throughout those years.
