The big divide: North v Southbank

The Southbank’s got Western Europe’s highest hotel, a new theatre and a revamped pleasure-palace power station on the way; meanwhile, the north side’s got a tech hub, a Candy & Candy tower and a cycle superhighway in the pipeline. Harry Mount on the fight for London’s flâneurs

Illustration by Andy Bumpus

Harry Mount

1 May 2014

You can blame the Emperor Claudius for London’s north-south divide. Although the Romans invaded from the south in 43 AD, they decided to cross the Thames and build Londinium on the north side of the river. The north had two firm, gravel-capped hills to build on, while the south was too marshy. For nearly 2,000 years after the Romans turned up, the north of the river has lorded it over the south — with the capital’s most important buildings, from Westminster Abbey to the Houses of Parliament, hugging the north bank. But no longer. If anything, in recent years, the tables have been turned. Prime property on the Southbank now costs £1,700 per sq ft. On the newly christened Northbank — the area by the river stretching along the Strand from Embankment to Tower Bridge — the rate is £100 cheaper.

The 2014 Southbank report by estate agents Knight Frank even goes so far as to call Southbank London’s Third City, along with its neighbours on the other side of the river, the Cities of London and Westminster. A touch of estate-agent exaggeration perhaps, but still, the formerly industrial Southbank has, like New York’s Meatpacking District, developed an artsy, fashionable cachet in recent years. The Jubilee Line extension in 1999 helped, as did the Harvey Nichols restaurant in the Oxo Tower and the reinvention of Borough Market. Where the young and hip came, commerce followed. News Corporation is moving to The Place near London Bridge (also known as the baby Shard), Al Jazeera is moving to the Shard, and Ogilvy & Mather is migrating to Sea Containers House.

One in four new tower developments in Central London are now on the Southbank. Among the residential developments are the South Bank Tower — the old King’s Reach Tower, with 191 flats, starting from £885,000 — and One Tower Bridge, opposite the Tower of London, by Berkeley Homes, with flats from £1.1m. It’s all part of what planners call Vancouverism, named after the Canadian city where a young crowd colonised run-down, urban centres.

When it comes to signature buildings, the Southbank has been eclipsing its northern neighbour for more than 60 years now: from the Royal Festival Hall in 1951, to the Hayward Gallery in 1968, the National Theatre in 1976, Shakespeare’s Globe in 1997, the London Eye and Tate Modern in 2000 and the Shard, which opened last year. Boris Johnson is given to saying that the new Battersea Power Station development will kick off a Left Bank that’s longer than Paris’, though not as picturesque.

On top of all that there’s a new five-star hotel at the top of the Shard, opening this month, occupying levels 34 to 52 of Renzo Piano’s 72-storey skyscraper. The Shangri-La’s 202 rooms — with an Anglo-Asian theme, reflecting the group’s Hong Kong-based owners — will each have pretty spectacular views through the glazed walls across the capital. GONG, on the 52nd floor, will be London’s highest bar. Throw in the new Mondrian hotel in Sea Containers House and surely the south has won?

Not necessarily. ‘Northbank’ is fighting back. The name may be a PR construct — like Midtown, the awkward nickname foisted on Holborn, or NoHo, the name no one uses for Fitzrovia — but the burst of activity on the north side of the Thames is real enough.

Much of it is thanks to the Northbank Business Improvement District (or BID) — paid for by local businesses to invigorate the area — which covers the mile between the Royal Courts of Justice and Admiralty Arch, taking in part of Embankment and Temple. Northbank stretches down to the river in the south, and up to Covent Garden in the north. Several towers are in the planning stages — including a Candy & Candy development by Norman Foster called Sugar Quay, on the north side of the Thames by Tower Bridge.

Somerset House is being revitalised with Spring, a fine-dining restaurant from Skye Gyngell, opening in late September in a wing of the building that hasn’t been open to the public for 150 years. It is Gyngell’s first solo venture since her departure from Petersham Nurseries in 2012. ‘The restaurant will bring Skye’s signature style of cooking — simple, elegant, seasonal and ingredient-led — to a stunning site,’ says a spokesperson.

Somerset House is also installing small and medium-sized businesses, priced out of Tech City, in the warren of offices once given over to the Inland Revenue and the Registrar General of Births, Marriages and Deaths. Taxi app company Hailo was one of the first to move in. Silicon House anyone?

The biggest boost is Thomas Heatherwick’s Garden Bridge, dreamed up by Joanna Lumley in 1998. Fundraising is continuing for the £150m bridge. Planning permission has not yet been granted, but it’s hoped it will be in September and construction will begin in 2017. ‘The idea of the bridge didn’t come to me like a blinding flash,’ Lumley tells me. ‘I was always drawn to the idea of fantastical bridges and being suspended over the water. I’m also drawn to the strangeness of gardens in odd places, like the old Derry & Toms Roof Garden in Kensington.’

Lumley first proposed the Garden Bridge as a memorial to Diana, Princess of Wales, but it lost out to the fountain in Hyde Park. ‘Recently the bridge became not just desirable but mandatory!’ she says. ‘London has a strange, quickly won confidence since the Olympics. We used to say, “Oh, we’ll just cock stuff up.” But now, everyone is so enthusiastic about the bridge — Transport for London, Boris... There’s been a generous and thrilling interest from big and important companies outside London. We overuse the word iconic, but this bridge, in arguably the most important city in the world, will become a very central thing.’

Lumley loves the idea you won’t be able to see from one end of the bridge to the other, so great will be the profusion of trees and plants: ‘Thomas has designed it so there is a mass of different dart shapes moving in and out, with lots of little corners to dawdle and stare at the river; not a lot of long, flat views. It also reminds us of the wonderful things on the north side: Middle Temple has all the glories of medieval England. There’s Fleet Street and the Law Courts and Somerset House. We are part of something that is already happening on the northbank — a great sleeping giant that’s awakening.’

Although, of course, the bridge is a major artery between north and south, it’s thought the north will be the major beneficiary, used as a suspended park (rather like The High Line in New York) as much as a means of getting from A to B. ‘The stunningly beautiful new Garden Bridge is set to reconnect the south and north quadrants at this point on the Thames, helping transform the overlooked Aldwych area,’ says Boris Johnson. ‘The Northbank development will create a wonderful new amenity in this previously bleak area of town that will perfectly complement the plethora of cultural activity on the Southbank.’

For decades, Northbank has been treated as a thoroughfare between the Cities of London and Westminster. The border between the two ancient cities slices through the Strand just by the Royal Courts of Justice, where Christopher Wren’s Temple Bar, now transplanted to the north side of St Paul's, used to mark the boundary. ‘Trafalgar Square’s place in the nation’s heart has always been secure, but its hinterland of Aldwych, Temple and the Strand, while not exactly neglected, has always been rather overlooked,’ says Mark Field, MP for the Cities of London and Westminster. ‘Aldwych in particular has found itself an oddly transitional quarter, the place where Theatreland peters out and the City begins, and where imposing buildings turn their backs on the Thames. The Northbank BID is an ambitious project that will inject the kind of life into this quarter that its location warrants.’

There are some real plums in the area: Somerset House and the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Savoy and Adelphi theatres, the Savoy hotel and exceptional churches: St Mary le Strand, Christopher Wren’s St Clement Danes and the medieval Savoy Chapel. But these gems are considered separately, not linked together as some identifiable, unifying location. And, like so much of London, the buildings seem to turn their back on the river. The Northbank BID aims to turn the clock back to the 1920s, when the Strand was the fashionable centre of London. The street was still chic enough to lend its name to Strand cigarettes in 1959 — ‘You’re never alone with a Strand’ — and the mysterious dance recommended by Roxy Music in the 1973 hit ‘Do the Strand’. Somewhere over the past 40 years, the Strand lost its mojo and became little more than a mile-long traffic jam. ‘There’s going to be an enormous transformation,’ says Ruth Duston, chief executive of the Northbank BID. ‘There’ll be more pedestrianisation, and a radical rethink of traffic management to make things easier for pedestrians and cyclists. We’re going to green the area, too, and stop the Strand being an urban motorway.’

Among the Northbank schemes is a new pier by the Savoy Hotel — ‘There are far better views of the river here than on the Southbank,’ says Duston. Boris Johnson’s cycle superhighway will be extended along the Embankment. And actors from the West End will be invited to colonise Northbank, with performances in the bandstand in Victoria Embankment Gardens. Artists will sell their pictures on the riverside, as Parisian painters do. In September, the Northbank BID will combine with the Mayor to increase usage of the Thames during the so-called River Month. A wildflower trail will run through Northbank, to celebrate the prospective opening of the Garden Bridge.

‘Northbank has lacked investment; the love has been lost,’ says Duston. ‘We’re going to restore its former glory.’

Here’s hoping that, 1,600 years after the Romans recrossed the Thames, the days of riverbank rivalry are finally over.

Harry Mount is author of How England Made the English (Penguin, £9.99)

The big divide: North v Southbank

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