First look: does London’s latest skyscraper Walkie the Talkie?

You’ve seen the Walkie Talkie ­­ — its 38-storey bulbous form is hard to miss. The City office tower, now almost complete, made headlines for all the wrong reasons last summer when its convex glass façade concentrated sunshine into a “death ray” that, when reflected, could fry eggs on the pavement and melted the tender bits of a parked Jag on nearby Eastcheap.

The episode seemed to confirm its reputation as a 177-metre-tall robotic bruiser photo-bombing tourist snaps of Tower Bridge and aggressively elbowing its way through the skyline. Its mushrooming shape, with office floors that get ever more vast towards the top, is calculated to more fully exploit the views and the higher rents that come with them. It has been described as a diagram of developer greed.

Positioned, contrary to the City Corporation’s own policies, outside the defined cluster of tall financial towers, the Walkie Talkie looms with its dumpy body and thick neck jutting aggressively forward as if it is about to start a sack race, thumping its way towards the river, crushing Eastcheap and Billingsgate with each bounce. With a face only a mother could love (with egg on it, at that), even its original architect, the Uruguayan Rafael Viñoly, has distanced himself from his creature.

The Evening Standard has been given exclusive access to the interior of 20 Fenchurch Street — its proper name — just as the first metal shades are being fixed to the south façade in a bid to kill the death ray and workers are busy planting out the Sky Garden, the triple-height conservatory that crowns the tower. Due to open in December, the Sky Garden’s three restaurants and free public-viewing platform were a key justification for the building flouting all the rules.

Peter Rees, the City of London’s former chief planner, was keen on creating a “party city in the sky” for bankers and pushed it through despite a public enquiry and objections from Unesco and English Heritage, not least for its effect on the setting of the Tower of London World Heritage Site. Given the problems of the exterior, the interior has a lot to make up for.

Enter the building today and you are in a light-filled double-height lobby that wraps around all four sides. Floors are handsomely detailed grey-veined white Carrara marble, walls are French limestone, the reception desk back-lit onyx. Yet for all this stony luxury it is plain to the point of dullness rather than elegantly sparing.

Shoot up to the 24th floor — one of the few office floors not yet let and fitted out — and the 360-degree views are staggering. London is laid out below you: Alexandra Palace to Crystal Palace, the Wembley arch to Stratford’s Olympic stadium. That sense of space is important because 6,000 people will be crammed in. Office blocks usually have 10 sqm of space for each employee but here that’s reduced to eight, made possible by double-decker lifts and extra loos. Talking of which, a quirk of the automatic basin taps means they are triggered in sequence by passing hi-vis vests, turning the gents into a budget version of the Villa d’Este’s fountains — something that won’t be a problem for the suits. By contrast to the blank lobby, toilet walls are clad in a lurid African black marble with gold veins, better suited to the facilities at Spearmint Rhino than the workplace.

The Sky Garden has its own entrance in the south-west corner of the tower. Lifts open onto its soaring glass vault that is supported between a toast rack of steel ribs. You can step out from the conservatory onto a balcony below the tower’s canopy that cantilevers out 13 metres above the streets.

Inside it is still a building site but the restaurants and gardens are taking shape. A three-storey stone-clad block at the centre holds two stacked restaurants, the third is an informal bar on the southern viewing platform. This block is flanked to its east and west sides by terraced gardens and staircases that climb towards the northern platform. Two hundred tons of soil is being shovelled into place to support a landscaping scheme that tells the story of the evolution of plants.

The Sky Garden’s conservatory is sheltered but naturally ventilated, with temperatures expected to range from the low 40s to -5°C so Kew has advised on species that should, hopefully, survive these conditions. At the prehistoric end this means tree ferns, cycads and ficus while the lower end of the terrace will display meadow flowers. There will be paths to wander through but with just a few feet of soil to grow in it’s hard to imagine the planting getting excitingly jungle-y like a true palm house. It’s easier to imagine the conservatory getting stiffling and steamy — even on a warmish September day it is already hot and muggy inside. The views from this height, however, are more spectacular still.