Horizon 22 trumps the Shard to become London’s highest viewpoint (and it’s free)

You don’t have to be that old to remember when the NatWest Tower stood alone. I used to marvel at it from my childhood bedroom on a hill three miles south-east of London’s financial heart. Topping out at 183 metres in 1980, it was small by international standards yet loomed large in a city where planning rules had crushed any real vertical ambition.

How much the capital — and its attitudes to height — have changed in recent years is evident as I look out from a new skyscraper over the road. At 278m, 22 Bishopsgate, which was completed in 2020, is the tallest building in the square mile that makes up the City of London, and the second-highest in the metropolis after The Shard (310m).

At first I don’t even notice NatWest bank’s old HQ, now known as Tower 42, from my vantage point on the 58th floor of the new building. It’s only when I drop my gaze that I spot its triangular roof some 70m beneath my feet, which are pressed against the glass. I watch the white hard hats of a maintenance crew and peer down through giant roof vents that look like upturned jet engines.

Until quite recently, I would have needed to have been airborne to enjoy views like this. But this week my viewpoint in 22 Bishopsgate opens as Horizon 22, the capital’s highest observation gallery, 254m above the ground — though The Shard’s dramatically tapering glass walls stretch higher, its top-floor viewing platform is at 244m. And whereas access to the Shard’s platform costs about £30 per head, Horizon 22 is free (though tickets must be pre-booked and the first 30,000 were snapped up within hours of going online last week).

It also raises the bar in an architectural high jump gripping the capital, where increasingly permissive planning committees are making public access a condition of scale, and where developers are using views to market office buildings as destinations.

Looking up again, I can see the three residential towers at The Barbican and, beyond that, the pebbledashed supertanker that Google will soon occupy at King’s Cross. I squint at St Paul’s Cathedral as it catches the morning sun. It’s a measure of London’s traditional aversion to height that the cathedral scraped the heavens without competition for more than 250 years before Millbank Tower rose above the Thames at Westminster in 1963.

St Paul’s is also one of the reasons for that modesty, especially in the Square Mile, where planning rules forbid building that would directly overshadow it. Citywide restrictions also maintain “protected views” of its dome from distant places such as Alexandra Palace and Richmond Park.

There is less protection to the east, where the Square Mile’s skyscrapers are clustered. Yet it would take another 30 years for any other tower in the financial centre to rise higher than Tower 42, when the Heron (now Salesforce) Tower topped out in 2010. Today, five buildings in the City — and 16 across London — look down on Tower 42. Ten of these, including four in the City, have been completed in the past decade.

“At the end of the day, we react to market forces,” says Shravan Joshi, chair of the City of London’s planning and transport committee. “We’re geographically constrained as a square mile, so we have to go up.” Joshi, who grew up in Wimbledon, south-west London, also describes a “call to arms” that came with the rise of Canary Wharf.

The City has also been anxious to broaden its appeal beyond the working week. Enforcing access to new buildings that were becoming brands became strategic. “We realised that having these impenetrable fortresses doesn’t really do much for the public,” Joshi says. Shops and restaurants have helped banish the weekend tumbleweed. After Covid, the challenge then also became to tempt workers back to their desks.

Viewing decks are also part of that shift. There has long been a tradition of surveying London from above. You can climb St Paul’s (whose highest viewing gallery wraps around the top of the dome at 85m; the top of the golden cross reaches 111m), and the London Eye observation wheel (135m) has been spinning since 2000. But, as the capital grew higher, The Shard offered the first viewing floor packaged as a modern visitor attraction in 2013.

Further competition for elevated eyes lies between us, at the “Walkie Talkie” (20 Fenchurch Street). Its 38th-floor Sky Garden opened in 2015. Last month saw the opening of The Lookout, on the 50th floor of 8 Bishopsgate. Further west, Battersea Power Station has added a surreal, Willy Wonka twist to the arms race by pushing visitors out of the top of one of its chimneys in a glass elevator.

Perhaps mindful of the criticism the Sky Garden received for underwhelming flora and pricey cocktails, Joshi’s committee further stipulated that Horizon 22 could only have one small kiosk and hardly any seating. There are no gimmicks; the experience is the view. It gives me the feeling of an urban explorer more than a tourist exhorted to spend. There isn’t even a gift shop.

In a city where rooftops are traditionally reserved for pigeons or champagne-swilling suits, the purported democratic intent of Horizon 22 is worth placing in context. Axa, the building’s owner, will soon begin marketing it as an evening events space, fees for which are likely to induce leg wobbles. And a separate fancy restaurant will at some point occupy the still empty two floors above. “We don’t see this as a burden but as an opportunity,” says Phillip Shalless, senior asset manager at Axa.

After all, the building needs something to shout about after a difficult birth. The City gave permission for the taller Pinnacle tower here in 2006, only for it to be abandoned after the financial crisis. Axa led the purchase of its concrete stump in 2015. Work finished on more than 1mn sq ft of office space just as the pandemic was hollowing out the City.  

Workers have returned, and Shalless says the building is now almost 70 per cent occupied, with up to 4,000 people clocking in on midweek days. A viewing deck with an Instagram profile can only enhance the building’s steel-and-glass profile. “Everyone’s experience here reflects on our offices,” he says.    

I take more time to gaze through the glass, admiring with new eyes an ancient city that I’ve watched grow for more than 40 years. It looks reassuringly familiar: the Thames, now shimmering in the morning sun like molten silver, still snakes eastward with its signature bends.

Yet the Square Mile is only one of several high-rise thickets that have sprouted this century. As well as Canary Wharf, I can see Nine Elms to the west and Croydon to the south. It takes me a few minutes to work out that the mysterious smudge rising from the haze to the south-east is Lewisham, where high-rise apartment blocks are mushrooming. I grew up not far away, when the idea of standing somewhere higher than Tower 42 would have felt like a dream.

horizon22.co.uk

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