In addition, the regulatory picture is changing, with councils increasingly reluctant to sanction projects requiring vast quantities of energy-intensive concrete. This was one of the given reasons for rejecting permission for the proposed “Tulip” skyscraper last month.
Alastair Moss, chairman of the City of London’s planning committee, has warned firms they will not even get “through the door” unless demonstrating they can show they’ve taken all options seriously, including whether they can refit instead of demolish.
“Our emerging policy is that we have a presumption against development, because we are looking at embodied carbon and the whole life cycle,” he says.
Buildings with better energy efficiency ratings would ultimately command higher rents anyway, he adds, making it a “win-win” for developers that take the plunge.
This is also the view of Orion Capital Managers, which bought BT Centre for £200m in 2019.
Aref Lahham, its managing director, says the eco-friendly revamp – expected to start in February and finish in 2024 – makes sense from both a commercial as well as environmental perspective.
“Corporates now want greener buildings that help them to build their own brand and attract the best talent, because these kinds of buildings are what the talent wants too,” he says. “Institutions also want to own them, so it is fantastic from our point of view because it marries good business sense with the things that are also generally good for the world.”
However, KPF’s Bushell hopes this new perspective will soon be applied to new buildings along with existing structures.
While green tech wizardry is all fair and well, he believes we need to start designing our buildings to be “workhorses that can be more easily repurposed in the future. Builders in the Georgian and Victorian eras, whose buildings have held up “remarkably well” over the past few centuries, show how this can be done.
“Whatever we build now should be durable for the future,” Bushell says. “Victorian warehouses are actually great examples of that, because over the centuries they’ve been workhouses, offices and now apartment complexes too.”
It is an intriguing idea, and one that will be put to the test over the next few years, as workers in St Paul’s watch BT Centre get a new lease of life.
