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Labour MP Martin Linton sets out the concerns raised in his Westminster Hall debate on tall buildings.
Despite the credit crunch, there is a rash of planning applications for tall buildings in London - and when I say tall, I'm not talking about what is usually meant by tall, such as 10, 15 or 20-storey buildings, but mega-tall buildings of 40, 50 or even up to 100 storeys.
And I'm not talking about mega-tall buildings just in central London or in areas where there already are clusters of tall buildings, such as Docklands, Croydon or Vauxhall. There are applications to build them in almost every shopping centre in my borough.
Some people may think that the recession will put paid to all these mega-tall schemes, but that's not necessarily true. Developers are forging ahead on the really big schemes that take three or four years to build in the hope they will catch the next big property upswing.
In my small part of London I've got one developer planning to erect two towers, one 32 storeys and one 42, on the former site of Young's brewery in Wandsworth and another planning two towers, both 42 storeys, next to Clapham Junction station.
The tallest buildings in my area are the 1960's tower blocks on the estates, but these towers will be twice their height and six or seven times the height of the department store in our shopping centre. They will completely dwarf the adjoining terraces of two or three storey Victorian houses.
The new owners of Battersea Power Station went even further and proposed the building of a 300-metre glass tower, the equivalent of 100 storeys, which would have been the tallest building in Europe. Fortunately this fell foul of the long-standing rule that no building should be allowed to spoil the view of Houses of Parliament from Westminster Bridge.
Tennyson wrote that "earth has not anything to show more fair" than the view from Westminster Bridge, so maybe we have him to thank for the fact that the owners were forced to rethink their scheme down from 100 storeys to about 13. They themselves say the scheme will be no worse and I am confident it will be better.
The Young's Brewery scheme was passed by the planning committee in Wandsworth, even though 71 of the 90 responses from the public were against it. I wrote to the minister to say I thought the approval was wrong and it should be called in. Fortunately this was one of those rare cases where the minister agreed the scheme needed another look (on quite a number of grounds) and there will now there will now be a public inquiry.
A huge campaign is under way to stop the towers in Clapham Junction. People feel they would look completely out of proportion in a Victorian town centre with buildings ranging from four to seven storeys. We want to keep our centre on a human scale. We have 614 objectors so far and we're aiming for 1,000.
But I would like to strike a blow not just against mega-towers in my constituency, but against the whole idea that we can improve our town centres by building high. Paris, Rome, Venice, Vienna, Prague and St Petersburg consign their tall buildings to defined areas. The result is cities that are elegant and atmospheric as well as economically successful.
Scrapping the height and density guidelines has frankly been a disaster. It means that architects compete against one another to build the tallest towers instead of complementing one another to create an attractive townscape.
It means developers pay too much for sites and then 'have to' build high to recover their outlay. It means the public are blackmailed by developers who will only build something good if we allow them to build something monstrous as well.
I say it is time to bring back the height guidelines that will give the developers the certainty they need to plan, will give the architects the discipline they need to flourish and the public the assurance that their local planning committee won't allow a 42-storey tower round the corner from their terrace.
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