There’s a new theatre, four live venues, ‘walk-in’ billboards, and a hotel for Hollywood A-listers with subwoofers en suite. So why is this West End development about as exciting as a 1980s business park?
‘Coarse in the extreme,” was how the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner described Centre Point in 1973. In his eyes, the white concrete office tower – which stands at the junction of New Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road like a gleaming signpost for central London – was a brute slab, every floor wrapped with a “remorseless horizontal zigzag”.
Fifty years later, it’s hard to imagine the words he would use to describe the tower’s new neighbours. Since the arrival of Crossrail, that great subterranean aquifer of people and property speculation, the northern end of Charing Cross Road has become a dumping ground for some of the most crass commercial architecture the capital has ever seen. We were promised that the Elizabeth Line would bring outer London closer to the centre. We weren’t told it would bring the crap out-of-town sheds with it.
