Should Lloyd’s be listed?

English Heritage believes that Richard Rogers's City landmark needs protecting — but it was never intended to be a monument...

This has become one of the I-don't-believe-it moments of modern life: the news that some building, barely out of moody, antisocial adolescence, has been proposed for listing as a building of historic and/or architectural interest. These grumpy objects, which still live in the public imagination as blots deserving dynamiting, are suddenly in the exalted company of Georgian terraces and the Houses of Parliament.

In the latest crop of would-be entrants to the heritage club, one stands out: the Lloyd's Building, now being considered by English Heritage as a candidate for listing. Lloyd's was described as "hideous" by members of the City of London's planning committee — the very people who had given it permission in the first place — before it was even finished. Even people who liked Lloyd's didn't say it was pretty. One was Peter Cook, the seer/teacher/architect who is now helping to design the Olympic Stadium. Back then, he praised Lloyd's for its "uncomfortableness".
Lloyd's, however, is also different from other modern buildings that get considered for listing. It has become a London icon, part of the visual furniture of the city. It is not a streaky, troubled housing estate but a gleaming artefact of stainless steel kept in immaculate condition by its owners, the 300-year-old insurance market Lloyd's of London. It also, as the City has remorselessly inflated its stock of office space, looks increasingly delicate, almost bijou, amid the tramp of skyscrapers around it.

There may still be those who rail against its monstrosity but I suspect this is a shrinking minority. Instead, the proposed listing of Lloyd's presents a different issue to that of run-down council blocks. Lloyd's problem is that it was never supposed to turn into heritage. Its architect, Richard Rogers, always sold it as the opposite of a monument, as a flexible, changeable, fluid construction whose lifts, staircases, pipes and privies were placed on the outside so that they could be easily switched around and replaced, and to allow unobstructed space on the inside.

Now Lord Rogers of Riverside, he has always inveighed against setting-in-aspic and obstructing progress. To list Lloyd's would be to go against the theory behind its design, and the lifelong trajectory of its eternally youthful, now 75-year-old architect. Listing would fix it, freeze it, place it in the realm of urban cryogenics.

Rogers himself is keeping silent on this subject. But to argue against protection, and therefore that the building could be swept away tomorrow, is to take his rhetoric too literally. Closer inspection of what he actually said back in 1986, when the building was finished, shows that he was as interested in creating a magnificent, almost romantic, artwork as in making a flexible, functional machine.

He compared its picturesque silhouette to the spiky Victorian Gothic law courts in the Strand, and stressed its relation to the medieval street plan of the City. He talked of the building's "scale, grain and shadow".

He spoke of "expressing" the "how, what and why" of the building, that "one may recognise in each part its process of manufacture, erection, maintenance and finally demolition".

In other words, he was interested in the look of it. So, in part, were his clients, who wanted to show that they were not a fusty bunch of old buffers. It still flips up on their home page with the tag "the best architecture in London", a quote from a member of the public. What they got was an artistic tour-de-force, which a contemporary critic compared to the monomaniacal masterpieces of Antonio Gaudí. It is also a highly crafted artefact, with every handrail and seam lovingly detailed by the talented young architects in his office at the time, several of whom went on to make names for themselves in their own right.

Perhaps the biggest giveaways are the cute blue cranes at the very top. These symbolise the idea that Lloyd's is a perpetual building site, forever in flux. But they only symbolise it: their actual role is to carry cleaning cradles.

As it turned out, Lloyd's was not more flexible than other buildings, and possibly less so. The American writer Stewart Brand called it "wastefully expensive, conspicuously maladaptive". Its lifts and pipes have not been flipped about and rearranged as it was implied they could be. They are in exactly the same places as they were in Margaret Thatcher's second term.

Meanwhile, the ideas pioneered at Lloyd's have been put into practice on less spectacular buildings, including some by Rogers's practice. It is now standard procedure for office blocks to be made in what he called "a kit of parts", with toilet blocks and chunks of façade made in a factory and shipped to the building site.

These office blocks do not, however, display their workings to the world, as Lloyd's does. They are wrapped in a skin which can look a little like a Renaissance palazzo, or just be a neutral grid of glass, depending on the taste of client and architect.

Sadly, offices since Lloyd's also dispense with "scale, grain and shadow". These qualities tend to be lacking in the papery wrappers of modern office blocks, and there is almost no chance that a building of Lloyd's intense craftsmanship will ever be built again in the Square Mile.

Now the City's idea of flexibility is to rip up and rebuild at greater volume, not to rearrange the plumbing. Delicate Lloyd's is being ringed by bigger or higher blocks, including a tower by Rogers's former partner, Norman Foster, across the street, and another by Rogers himself, the 700-foot Leadenhall Building, the site for which is now being cleared. Seen with a cold commercial eye, the Lloyd's site is a soft spot. It is ripe — market conditions permitting — for something fatter, more efficient, and more profitable.

Lloyd's is less than 30 years old, which according to the Government's rules means it has to meet two conditions. It has to merit one of the higher levels of listing — grade I or grade II starred — and it has to be endangered. English Heritage is currently pondering these
questions, after which it will recommend something to the Department
of Culture, which will make the final decision.
Lloyd's can be criticised, vigorously, for failing to live up to its functionalist theory. Over the years it has been, including by the users of the building. Probably no commercial building should ever be built in quite this way again, and no one, Rogers included, has tried. Listing will also have its cost, in the many millions, in terms of the theoretical value of the site if it were demolished.

But if we are to have a system of listing buildings that places architectural merit ahead of property developers' profit then Lloyd's deserves to be protected ahead of many more ordinary structures that are listed. It was the building of the Eighties, a glittering pinnacle in an architecturally dim decade. It is the main London work of someone who will go into the history books as one of Britain's most famous architects. If listing Lloyd's means admitting that it is, and was, more monument than machine, so be it.