Millionaire towers: Your guide to the luxury skyscrapers reshaping London's skyline
Millionaire towers: Your guide to the luxury skyscrapers reshaping London's skyline
There's been an explosion of residential towers across the capital — mostly catering to the super-rich
Morning — twenty years ago there were just six skyscrapers in London solely built for people to live in. That number has now exploded to just under 100. And the Spy can reveal that the penthouse at the top of one recently sold for a record-breaking sum. We investigate the new wave of luxury skyscrapers reshaping the London’s skyline after your Thursday briefing below.
Plus: a mayoral campaign suffers a rapid unscheduled disassembly, a big breakthrough in the Stephen Lawrence case, and another pedestrianisation project.
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What we’ve spied
🗳️ You can’t say the Spy didn’t warn you — London mayoral hopeful Daniel Korski has quit the race after TV producer Daisy Goodwin publicly accused him of groping her in Downing Street. His campaign started unravelling on Monday when Goodwin penned a piece in the Times alleging that ten years ago Korski, then an advisor to prime minister David Cameron, put a hand on her breast after a meeting. Goodwin had previously spoken about the incident but left the groper unnamed, but she went public this week given Korski was standing to take on Sadiq Khan in next year’s mayoral election. Korski got the news midway through a hustings with the other two Conservative hopefuls, dashing off after an aide waved at him and then leaving his chair empty for the remainder of the event. Though Korski strongly denied the allegation and limped on with his campaign, by Wednesday evening he announced he was dropping out, citing the pressure on his family. The writing was on the wall when some of his backers put their support on ice and Goodwin said more women had come forward to her with “stories”. With Korski out that just leaves Susan Hall and Mozammel Hossain in the running to take on Khan. Conservative Campaign Headquarters has said they’ll both proceed to a ballot of party members next week, but some Tory MPs have called for the process to be restarted.
🔍 A mortifying moment for the Met this week when the BBC named a major suspect in the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence after uncovering evidence missed by police. Matthew White had a dodgy alibi, a resemblance to a previously unidentified fair-haired attacker and he had even told multiple people he’d been present at the 1993 attack in south-east London. All of this wasn’t properly looked at by police, the BBC investigation found, and it’s perhaps now too late for justice, as White died in 2021, aged 50. The extra gut punch is that the case against White implicates other suspects who remain free — only two people were ever found guilty of the murder of 18-year-old Lawrence, despite Lawrence’s friend Duwayne Brooks saying six youths had attacked them near a bus stop in Eltham. Following the BBC’s reporting, the Met, which had closed the case in 2020, also named White as a suspect and said: “unfortunately, too many mistakes were made in the initial investigation". Lawrence’s mother, Baroness Doreen Lawrence, said there needs to be “serious sanctions” against the officers who failed to investigate White.
🏳️🌈 London Pride is this Saturday, but there are accusations of “rainbow-washing” being levelled at this year’s headline sponsor: United Airlines. The Green Party’s deputy leader Zach Polanski has accused City Hall of failing to show “climate leadership” by not criticising the sponsorship decision. He went on to question the mayor’s relationship with the airline after it funded Sadiq Khan’s trip to America last year. Khan pointed out that City Hall pays for less than a tenth of Pride’s total cost, with London in Pride having to find the remaining cash in difficult economic circumstances, and he also highlighted that sponsors are vetted for their commitment to social and environmental responsibility. Meanwhile, TfL has launched a campaign to celebrate London’s LGBTQ community ahead of Saturday’s parade, featuring buses and trains wrapped in rainbow colours.
🏞️ Defeat for the Friends of Finsbury Park in their battle to expel Wireless Festival. Haringey Council has now signed a five-year deal with the festival’s promoter, meaning Wireless will now be taking place in Finsbury Park every summer until 2027. It’d previously been arranged on a yearly basis — to the constant opposition of the Friends of Finsbury Park, which complained of noise, drug-taking and anti-social behaviour. Elsewhere in park life: Hackney council is considering limiting the number of dogs any one person can walk at once to four, in a bid to control bad canine behaviour in the borough’s parks.
👣 More of central London is getting pedestrianised — this time in an area just north of St Paul’s Cathedral. The City of London has approved plans to pedestrianise roads around St Paul’s Gyratory, creating a new public square in the process, similar to the creation of the Aldgate Square in 2018.
🏧 HSBC is moving out of its global headquarters in Canary Wharf to considerably smaller offices in the City of London. The financial services giant is moving in response to post-pandemic hybrid working arrangements and a cost-cutting drive.
🌊 London’s biggest water supplier might be taken into temporary public ownership amid fears it’s about to collapse. Ministers and regulators are drawing up contingency plans for Thames Water, which is struggling to pay its £14bn worth of debt. The company’s chief executive resigned suddenly on Tuesday with immediate effect. There’s growing public anger about the performance of water companies — just last week the Guardian found leaks from Thames Water’s pipes were at the highest level in five years.
🎭 Some cultural highlights we’ve spied this week:
The Young V&A Museum is re-opening this Saturday after being closed for three years for a £13m redevelopment. The museum, which is dedicated to children and young people, is situated in Bethnal Green.
Tickets are still available for comedian Stewart Lee’s stand-up show at the Southbank Centre. His run started yesterday and lasts until Sunday, July 2.
Nearby on the South Bank is the last weekend of the National Theatre’s free River Stage festival, which from Friday is being led by Hackney Empire’s Young Producers
There’s also still tickets for Dog Day Afternoon — a punk festival at Crystal Palace on Saturday that’s got Iggy Pop headlining.
Coinciding with the release of Wes Anderson’s new film Astroid City is a new exhibition at 180 Studios, featuring original sets, props, costumes and artwork
Rise of the millionaire towers
You might know it as the ‘boomerang’ or the ‘vase’. Some say it looks a bit like a handheld hoover on its side. Known officially as One Blackfriars, the shimmering 50-storey skyscraper next to Blackfriars Bridge recently broke a new record: it logged the most expensive ever flat sold in a UK skyscraper.
The sale was unusually quiet — the Spy can find no evidence of an estate agent listing or journalists being given a ‘sneak peek’. One clue is an early sales brochure which declares that a “pentuplex” would be the “crowning glory of One Blackfriars”, occupying the top five floors of the tower. The only glimpse we can find inside is an odd video posted by the company tasked with sealing its panoramic windows. Yet the Spy can now reveal that this penthouse recently sold for £57.6m, according to land registry records.
The price tops all other flat sales officially logged in London’s skyscrapers. Even the penthouse in St George Wharf — or the ‘Tower of Toffs’ as the Guardian branded it — sold for less at £51m. The closest contender is the penthouse flat in Centre Point Tower, another new luxury development near Tottenham Court Road, which listed in 2021 for £55m. It appears to not have sold, however, since public records show the highest sold price logged in the building is a relatively measly £22.2m.
You might say it’s convenient that the One Blackfriars’ penthouse sold so quietly. The record-breaking price tag may have drawn attention to the fact that the development contains exactly zero affordable housing units, despite the mayor’s target for developers to make 35% of new build units “genuinely affordable”.
It may have also reminded people that the top floors of the building, which are now occupied by the penthouse flat, were originally going to be made into a public viewing gallery big enough to host 800,000 visitors a year. This was one of developer Berkeley Group’s key selling points for the tower when it was first approved in 2009 to help placate public dissent at the time. But in a later application, the developers argued the public sky deck wouldn’t have been commercially viable, and they got their way. The plan was ditched.
More broadly, though, the sale of a £57.6m penthouse is reflective of a major shift that’s underway for London’s skyline. While the city has long featured very tall towers, it has only recently exploded with residential tall towers — many of which are being tailored to the tastes of the super-rich.
As of 2023, there are now almost 100 buildings over 300ft in the city that are designated for residential use, ranging from 23 stories to a staggering 77 stories, according to the Spy’s count of listings from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Almost all of them have popped up very recently: out of all the residential towers above 300ft, two-thirds were completed in the past five years, while over 80% were completed in the past decade.
The idea of building residential towers this tall was once pursued mainly by the government. In 1970, the 304ft Hyde Park Barracks tower was built to house officers and soldiers of the British Army’s Household Cavalry. In 1972, the Greater London Council built west London’s Trellick Tower to help replace sub-standard local Victorian housing. Between 1973 and 1976, the three towers of the Barbican estate became the tallest residential towers in Europe.
Now things are different. High-end flats in tall towers built by commercial developers are a constant feature of London’s property market, and they now regularly sell for eye-watering sums. In the past decade, the Spy counts 60 flats sold in towers over 300ft for over £5m, and over 200 that sold for over £3m. Meanwhile, tall residential towers built since 2013 have sold an average of 65 flats for over a million pounds when adjusted for inflation.
While not all the flats in these towers are what you’d call ‘luxury’, some say the government could be doing a lot more to insert new affordable housing. “We’re talking about a city in which there's just a palpable sense of a massive social crisis, and then you allow tens of thousands of units to come in through high rise, and none of it, almost none of it is affordable, and none of it is social,” said professor Rowland Atkinson of the University of Sheffield in conversation with the Spy.
Part of the problem is who developers are marketing flats in the towers to: international buyers. Professor Atkinson explained: “If you don't set thresholds, you have a city in which the demand for housing is not bounded by the boundary of London. And if you look at what's going on internationally, there is more or less a limitless number of people with sufficient money to express interest in that.”
Berkeley Group didn’t respond to the Spy’s request for comment on the pentuplex sale at One Blackfriars. There’s plenty of other towers like it, though. Here are some of the most extravagant new entrants to London’s skyline:
1. Landmark Pinnacle
A 75-storey tower on the Isle of Dogs, Landmark Pinnacle is the tallest residential building in the country. The tower, which was completed in 2020, has already seen over 60 flats sold for over a million pounds, according to official logs. Its height is not for everyone, though. The Spy spotted one review from a resident who said that “creaking sounds” made it feel like you’re on an “old wooden ship in rough seas”. Eek.
2. Damac Tower
Otherwise known as the Jenga Tower, Damac Tower is a brand new 50-story building that literally looks like a haphazard Jenga Block. The weirdest thing about it is that it was apparently all designed by fashion house Versace, with Donatella herself named as the “creative director”. In practice, that means there’s a Versace floor mat, Versace-detailed backsplashes and Versace patterns lining the swimming pool and jacuzzi. If that’s to your taste, the duplex penthouse was listed last year at £13 million.
3. St George Wharf
St George Wharf is a cylindrical block likened to a nasal hair clipper. It was the tallest residential skyscraper in the country when it was built in 2014, but now ranks 8th. In 2015, it emerged that almost two-thirds of homes inside it were in foreign ownership, and its £51m penthouse, which is 24 times larger than the average new three-bedroom home in the UK, had been bought by a firm believed to be run by Russian oligarch Andrei Guriev.
4. The Chelsea Waterfront West Tower
This 37-storey spikey-looking tower boasts views down the river to Canary Wharf and Crystal Palace and up the river to Wembley Stadium. Its £30m triplex penthouse was reportedly bought by Roman Abramovich, which you’d imagine might have been convenient for when he owned Chelsea Football Club. That was before the sanctions, though.
5. Strata
Familiar to anyone who lives around Elephant & Castle, Strata SE1 was the tallest residential building in London at the time of its construction in 2010. One of the most notorious parts of its design is the three wind turbines at the top of the tower, which were initially hoped to power 8% of its energy needs. They’ve basically never moved though, having been switched off after residents complained about the vibrations they caused.
6. Westmark Tower
Westmark is a 29-story curved tower set within private landscaped gardens in Marylebone with views over both Hyde Park and Regent’s Park. Amenities for residents include: a 17m swimming pool, a steam room, sauna, gym, studio and a “private” cinema room. The build finished in 2021, but penthouses recently went on the market for £12.8m.
7. Centre Point Tower
Centre Point Tower isn’t strictly a new tower, but is the result of a major refurb of an iconic 1960s brutalist office block in central London. When it reopened in 2018, the cheapest one-bed flat was put on the market for just over £1.8m and the penthouse was later advertised at £55m. Its developers have come under fire for including no affordable flats and instead creating a separate low-rise block to fulfil its affordable housing requirements — dubbed the “poor house” by campaigners.
8. One Park Drive
A 57-story cubic cylindrical tower in Canary Wharf, One Park Drive is currently the fourth tallest residential skyscraper in the city. Finished in 2021, its minimalist-chic duplex penthouse recently went on the market for £9.25m, featuring a “hidden garden” and a “sculpted spiral staircase”.
9. Wardian East Tower
The Wardian East Tower was completed in 2018. It was named after the Wardian case, a sealable glass container designed for growing plants. Amenities include: a botanical gin garden, a swimming pool set in a tropical jungle and private sky gardens for every resident.
10. The Heron
The Heron is a 36-storey tower near the Barbican residential estate within the City of London which had some luxury penthouses go on the market for £30m. Built by Heron International, the tower was built as part of a wider redevelopment of Milton Court, that also included a new teaching and performance centre for the Guildhall School.