Scheming with Ian Simpson | Place North West Podcast

Thank you, a pleasure to be here. It's quite interesting how quickly it has changed actually. We have some old photographs – old, I mean they date back to 2017 – and there's nothing on the skyline into the south there. Beetham Tower was obviously constructed pre-Great Recession, so 2007 I moved into Beetham Tower and then the whole world fell off the edge of a cliff, so nothing happened. Even though we did actually have lots of planning permissions, including the Renaissance site, Great Jackson Street, etc., all stopped. So it took quite a few years for Manchester to start introducing cranes on its skyline again. I was fortunate enough to work with Darren Whittaker of Renaker, and we started to think about the Great Jackson Street master plan. But at the time he owned what was called Owen Street, and he'd bought it from a previous client of ours, West Property, who had gone under in the recession. There was a sort of extant scheme, but I just knew there was an opportunity to rethink that scheme in terms of placemaking and also in terms of the way Darren wanted to approach the architecture and the buildings. What you've got to remember is that there was no precedent for this scale of tower at all in the north because values were so low, build costs were high, there was hardly any margin to make it worthwhile. That's why nobody was building anything until Beetham Tower was built. Manchester didn't have much of a skyline, but because Beetham Tower was built in the context of Roman Manchester with Deansgate and the Manchester fort in Castlefield, it seemed to end up on all the axes of all the roads coming in from Hyde and Liverpool. So we knew that whole area would act as a bit of a signpost, an opportunity to signal the city like a gateway. In terms of context, we've got the city core but then we've got this sort of rust belt that runs around the city where the old factories and slum housing were. Once that's cleared, there's an opportunity to create new development and high-density residential. The concept of creating a really sustainable city core by introducing more and more residential was really important. That rust belt is only between three and 600 metres wide, so it's not a big space. We started to think that if the contractor was capable of building tall, then we could optimise the density, maximise the amount of public realm at the ground floor, create retail and F&B primarily at the ground, and provide a backdrop to the historic Victorian core of Manchester. It started with that vision: a site to optimise density, 1,500 units on that site, over 3,000 people just in that one place. From there, Renaker were able to acquire other pieces of site and continue to roll out that vision of creating really elegant, flexible, cost-effective residential. Don't forget, this rust belt was a zone that cut off existing communities in Manchester like Ancoats or Hulme, where social housing existed. Manchester has a lot of social housing, but it never had housing of any value in the city centre. We were trying to complement that, not exclude social housing, but to complement what was already in the city centre. Unfortunately, most of the social housing in the city centre was given to people who couldn't get out, who couldn't afford to get out. That's why Hulme was rebuilt three times before it became the suburban part of the city it is now.

I think if people have a view, you have to respect that. But I don't look at the comment sections of anything to be honest, because as soon as I start, you value your mental health. I'm not on social media, thank God. I'm of an age where that doesn't mean anything to me. But you have to be able to put your head up and be criticised and praised equally. There is a split, and inevitably anything that's new – we can't all live in rose-covered cottages. There's the government proposal about streets and everybody should live in the equivalent of a Georgian terrace. That gets a density of about 250 homes per hectare. We're creating a thousand homes per hectare. You can't get the people in London – they don't need any more people, they turn people away. We actually need lots of people working together, brushing up against each other in the city, and the best way to achieve that is high-density development. But try to create beautiful buildings that have a silhouette and create a skyline for the city, an imagery that can be promoted. Whenever I look around at Christmas markets, every cup you pick up has got the Beetham Tower on it. Buildings do become icons for their city. That's the good side. Other people say it's just another glass tower. I accidentally read something this morning about an oil refinery at the end of Deansgate. How did that make me feel? I just think, okay, that's their interpretation. They can go back to Middleton suburbia and be happy. But people love living in those buildings.

You have to be as creative as possible. We could not have built One Blackfriars in Manchester. The sales value on One Blackfriars is over £2,000 per square foot, so a one-bed is £2 million. Here we've got apartments at £250,000. That's still a lot of money to a lot of people, but it's still within an affordable, tangible, accessible zone. Let's move on to the three schemes we're here to talk about. The one you're most proud of – we have already mentioned it a couple of times. It's difficult to pinpoint one particular scheme. I've chosen for this podcast a building called One Blackfriars, but it could have easily been Herbis, Number One Deansgate, or the Beetham Tower. It was a building that took 15 years of my life to build. As architects, we come up with sketches, and I came up with a sketch for that back in 2003 or something. I worked with the Beetham organization originally before the Great Recession, and we developed a building that was half hotel, half residential in the Beetham model. Then the Great Recession hit. Before that, we had to try and get planning permission. There's a resistance to development in a global city like London because they've got too many people, every developer is a greedy developer, and you're the stooge working for the greedy developer. There's no benefit whatsoever for the community in their view. You're dealing with 32 different communities, and the members of the planning committee go down and have a drink in the pub with the people complaining about any planning application. It's incredibly difficult to build anything. There's a requirement for 50% affordable, which is not surprising when prices start at £2,000 a square foot. So we had to go through a public appeal, a planning inquiry, to get permission. That probably took 15 months. We had to reduce the building by 10 metres high because it was visible from a 1950s bridge in St James's Park over the top of a whole series of buildings, bearing in mind you've got the London Eye and The Shard in the far distance three miles away. You could see the top of the building – faintly ridiculous. Now they're building buildings significantly taller than Blackfriars next door to it. This was going to be 60 plus, it ended up at 50 stories. I started with a building 220 metres tall, in the end it ended up at 150. The shape – it was a very particular site. We can gather apartments around any footprint effectively. To me, it's more about how you can create a really elegant form that contributes to the skyline at a distance but also, as you get closer, contributes to the public realm at ground floor level. The building tapers in at the ground and sits on 14 columns. That tapering allows you to create a new public square in the middle of a site that had never been publicly accessible before. It had a medium-scale building filling the whole site historically. We created a new square right in the middle of the site, and the building sloped away to the south and then returned on itself. It orientated the whole building towards St Paul's, so it has a very slender profile on the front. In fact, it's twice as slender as the Swiss Re Gherkin building. You could fit the hall of Blackfriars in the Swiss Re building, which is quite stumpy. So from the park, it had a very elegant slender profile, but it created a distinctive form that was about rising up, looking back towards the City of London, and making a play for Southwark to connect with the city. Southwark was poorer than the northern side of the river. That's really worked because there's lots of development following down Blackfriars Road now. At the time, we were the first tall building to do that. It took a long time to get planning, and then the site was sold by the Beethams to the Berkeley Group, who have a very strong reputation for high-quality residential but usually 10 stories, brick, balconies. This was something quite different, expensive buildings. It was quite different for Tony Pidgley, who sadly passed away but headed up Berkeley Homes at the time. I remember having meetings with him to negotiate a fee to carry on with the project, and then having to reduce significantly my fee to do the detailed design, otherwise another commercial architect would be appointed and would have effectively dumbed the whole building down. It would have been faceted, they wouldn't have put the passion and energy into the resolution of the detail. So we took a hit on the fee because we're passionate about seeing all our buildings delivered, so we can make decisions with the client on the value engineering process, which is inevitable on projects. We worked really hard to deliver that. The glazing – it's a twin-skin building because in London you have to have external amenities, balconies for every single apartment. There are examples of lots of towers with balconies on, and they just look horrible in London. At height, you can't use them because it's too windy, they just put the old fridge on them or the trainer, it just looks awful. There's lots of examples in Canary Wharf of that, and we didn't want to do that. So we sheathed the building in an outer skin of glass that was reactive to temperature, so it almost had gills that breathed and changed when the temperature got hot or cool and rained. It allowed us to create a very smooth surface on the outside of the building. I was inspired by a piece of glass that I've got in my collection at home by a designer called Toots Zynsky, and it's called a 'lanet' piece. It's an asymmetrical form, and it just gave me the idea that towers don't need to be axially symmetrical. They could be asymmetrical, particularly one trying to pick up the sense of movement from Blackfriars Road and the River Thames, both very dynamic influences on the form of that building.

I do, yeah.

Yes, yes. Somebody referred to it as a Kardashian the other day as well. I can't where that comes from, but it was promoted as the 'lanet' vase. In fact, the manufacturer got involved with St George, who were the delivery partner of Berkeley Homes. You've described this building in the past as the most beautiful tower building in the UK. Beauty is so subjective, but for what it's worth, I have a view on what is beautiful, and that building is incredibly beautiful. We could not do it again and could never have done it at another time. Now everything has changed – you can't have as much glass, there are different parameters around design. It's very much of its time. There is an insulated inner skin that's coloured, and it changes from earth tones to sky tones on the upper level. As you get closer to the building, you start to see these red and orange panels that sit behind the glass, and it brings it home that it's actually residential and not a commercial building. It's not like The Shard that is just plain. It has this layering and depth. Approaching the building gives legibility to the function and the program within, but from a distance it has a fantastic skyline. It's appeared on lots of films. I was really excited when I was watching a Mission Impossible and they jumped off the top of Tate Modern, and there was a 10-second freeze of Blackfriars there with Tom Cruise in the foreground. That must be surreal seeing one of your buildings. It is. You still see it now. It's not locked into the iconography of London like the Cheese Grater and the Gherkin are at the moment, but I do think it has a lot of beauty.

Interestingly enough, it was a competition that I think Allied London and the city council organized. It's a competition we bid for, but at that time we'd completed Beetham Tower but hadn't done that much work. We'd done Herbis, and we had a very elegant solution. This site is the Manchester Civil Justice Centre on the edge of Spinningfields. Interestingly enough, our proposal was virtually identical to what was built. We didn't win the competition, but Denton Corker Marshall won and came up with a very elegant proposition of two planes responding to the south and the north with a series of boxes that slide in and out, replicating the courts articulated within the building, and introduced colour. It's a very distinctive building, like a 'can opener' – the dynamic and sense of movement we always try to introduce within our work. I think the Civil Justice Centre is a really good modern addition to the city that we haven't been involved with, but we would have liked to have been.

There's so many that get away. We've been fortunate in the number of buildings we've been working on, but in competitions, the Germans used to think if you were successful in one in 17 that was a really good hit rate. Ours is probably more like one in four or one in five. There was a really beautiful scheme on the docks for a company called Maro that we designed and took to committee, and it lost by one vote in Liverpool. It just fell away. It was a tall building but had two crystalline pieces sort of leaning up to it, and it would have been a skyline icon for Liverpool without a doubt. But that one got away. I try not to think of those that get away because we do our very best. If we don't get there, we move on. We're constantly disappointed and upset, but we have to move on. There are lots of international schemes we've worked on in Sydney, Malaysia, Dubai that we've bid for that haven't gone ahead. So you're just grateful for the ones you can move forward with. I think we're very fortunate, and some people may say unfortunate for the city, that we've been able to work within the city and build a lot of what we think are really spectacular additions to Manchester.

It's quite interesting because it's actually not a building but a vision. Manchester has never had a large park. It wasn't a city of parks like London or some European cities. The parks were located on the outskirts – Philips Park, Alexandra Park – and they're big parks related to middle-class residential communities. Manchester has never had a park in the centre, and it could never have a park now. Mayfield Park is a good addition but relatively small, only 6.5 acres, compared with Alexandra Park which is 60 acres. We're not able to create a traditional Victorian Park in Manchester anymore. What we do have is about 120 pocket parks, squares, public spaces around the city. We all know them, we cross through them, they connect buildings. My vision is to create something completely unique in Manchester. With the changes we're starting to see around traffic and circulation, we have an inner ring road around Manchester which really defines the boundary. In between, it's 30 minutes walk north-south, 40 minutes walk east-west to the ring road. The ring road goes around the Mancunian Way, through Salford, past Manchester Arena and Great Ancoats Street. If you think of that, I'm not looking at replacing traffic because we have terrible problems with traffic, particularly to the south of the city in Deansgate. But the idea of elevating a park over the ring road – the ring road is about 40 metres wide and 5 miles long. If you were to start at one point and go around it, it would be 5 miles. Imagine maybe 20 metres high a deck full of landscaping, coffee shops, a bit of retail. It's almost like a grandiose version of what's being done in Castlefield at the moment on the viaduct, but something of an enormous scale that's circular, that wraps around the city. You can start on a walk and have a 5-mile walk, or drop down and connect with Mayfield, Castlefield, pass through all those areas. You can make physical connections around the city. It's a safe space for running, walking, wellbeing, landscaping, cycling, whatever we want to do, away from the street but connected to the street. It's a space that is there because nobody's built over the top of the Mancunian Way. I'd like to see this sort of Halo running round, this arc of light tracing the route of the inner ring road, but at an elevated level with landscaping on it. We could just start in one part. We would need some levelling up funding to do that. There's lots of space where you could take structure down and sort out technical things, but it needs a vision. There's nothing like it in the world. The High Line in New York is probably the closest thing, and when everyone thinks of New York now, it's not skyscrapers, it's the High Line, which was on top of an old rail viaduct. We've got the little thing in Castlefield, but something that captures the city and links all these spaces together would be a park on top of that, which would be 80 acres. Alexandra Park is 60 acres, so it's larger. It would be the new Victorian Park in Manchester, and it's the only way we could achieve something of that scale and continuity that links all those disparate areas of Manchester. It's an idea, but it's a fantastic one. I'll draw it, get some work done and some visuals, because we should be able to do something like that. If the government wants to provide some funding towards it, we need some projects that actually benefit the residents and visitors of the city and set Manchester out as a unique place. To create something that is unique in the world, we have an opportunity to do that in Manchester. Very few other cities do.