Blue sky building: how Islington is recasting itself as a ‘mini-Manhattan’

Wander down from the Angel, past the Georgian terraces and post-war new-builds of City Road, and as you spot the golden arches of McDonald's the buildings start to loom above you: Islington, the borough until now largely devoid of high-rises, is embracing the world of the skyscraper. Developers, marketers and sundry other boosters say, with few signs of hubris, that it’s recasting itself as a ‘mini-Manhattan’.

First, you arrive at the curiously named Lexicon. The inverted commas on the posters announcing its 36 ‘stories’ draw attention to the wordplay at the heart of the development’s marketing; Lexicon, we hear, speaks ‘the language of living’, though the buyers of each of its 146 apartments are likely to be as well versed in figures. A one-bedroom flat will set you back between £710,000 and £780,000; add another bedroom and you’re looking at well over £1m. A spa, pool, gym and 24-hour concierge service will be available. Poets, one suspects, need not apply.

Next, a few yards further along, is Canaletto — sitting, as its name suggests, slap bang up against the canal basin, where schoolkids take kayaking lessons and the odd optimist sits with rod and line. It’s a pleasant view, but not quite suggestive of 18th-century Venetian waterways or bustling European café culture. For a start, City Road is one of the capital’s most effective wind tunnels, threatening gritty eyes and blown-to-bits barnets to even the most determined of al fresco green-juice drinkers.

Across London, as the housing bubble has swelled, developments have been springing up everywhere, each bringing its own brand of aspirational marketing. To the east lies Vibe in Dalston, a ritzy block of flats that tells its potential customers ‘It’s all about setting a trend’, but also that ‘It’s all about the art of Dalston living’, something that I feel proud to have mastered in 1992, without the aid of the purple-trousered, twirly-moustached fop holding a bunch of flowers in the brochure.

To the west lies The Chilterns in Marlebone, so swanky that even its marketing suite requires a press release to announce ‘one of the most impressively dressed marketing suites ever’. The interiors themselves will feature the ‘iconic’ prints of photographer David Bailey and offer ‘an interior space like no other — unique, bespoke and entirely personal’. Luckily for The Chilterns, hot new restaurants Chiltern Firehouse and Fischer's are on its doorstep, as well as the concept stores of Blandford Street. Even in more modest Walthamstow, a new residential development in the town centre goes by the name The Scene.

At the recent launch of Canaletto’s Beaumont Collection — luxury three-bedroom apartments, retailing at £3.2m each, on the upper reaches of the tower’s 31 storeys — architectural historian and TV presenter Dan Cruickshank addressed the assorted property professionals and would-be buyers sipping elaborate cocktails and peering at the mocked-up interiors of dark wood, cool marble and underfloor heating; the kind of slightly masculine look favoured by expensive Alpine ski hotels designed for oligarchs.

Cruickshank argued forcefully for the power of intelligent design to make London’s new high-rise skyline a success rather than an eyesore, and invoked Roman architect Vitruvius and 19th-century aesthete John Ruskin. Circling a model of the completed tower, he pointed to ‘its flowing organic balconies’ and pronounced it ‘undoubtedly highly considered architecture that attempts to regain for the tower as a building type its ancient role of urban ornament’.

Strong stuff, and presumably music to the ears of the various parties behind Canaletto, from developers Groveworld to fund sponsors Orion Capital and Amsterdam-based architects UNStudio (perhaps even celebrity chef Jason Atherton, who supplied the canapés for Canaletto’s launch last October, at which silhouettes of hypothetical residents, dancing, drinking, kissing, were projected on to the building at nightfall). Names that you don’t recognise blaze from billboards all down City Road — social housing providers Affinity Sutton and architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the company behind Lexicon and the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai — as well as the ‘Considerate Constructors’ sign common to all of them.

My last trot around the neighbourhood, past the 24-hour supermarket so beloved of nightowls and stoners, past favourite local café the Shepherdess, with its trompe l’oeil fluttery green curtains, past the locksmith and The City Cobbler, produced a minor epiphany. I was looking at The Eagle, a development by Terry Farrell, designer of the MI6 building. ‘It’s more fun at the top,’ its slogans say, and ‘Live higher, see further’. Then my gaze rested on M by Montcalm, the 200-room hotel set to open in the autumn. It might promise cutting-edge gadgetry and a rooftop bar, but its name, and the evocative retro drawing outside, suggest exactly the kind of joint where one of Raymond Chandler’s devious femmes fatales might hole up.

All of these places are trying to make you think of somewhere else; the marketing suites that line the road are like so many obsequious waiters beckoning you into their restaurants on holiday. Of course, while they’re doing it, the area is actually changing; the yellow fever vaccination centre now has a big ‘restaurant to let’ sign plastered all over it, and the old boozer on the corner opposite boasts sun-flowers in the window.

But it’s also staying the same. The restaurants and bars of Upper Street in one direction and Hoxton and Shoreditch in the other aren’t far away, but should Canaletto’s residents want to venture from the building’s own café, restaurant or club, their nearest fashionable eaterie is the McDonald’s drive-thru, though it does cater for the New York lifestyle by remaining open three nights a week until 2am.