NOT THAT SORT OF BED…

Another 1000 beds have more than doubled Waterloo’s growing hotel provision, but was this really the best use for a site more naturally positioned to serve the sick?

Words Jan-Carlos Kucharek

I’ve never failed to be reassured by the location of St Thomas’s Hospital in London. Founded in the 12th century in Southwark, the hospital moved to its present site at Waterloo in 1868, built on land reclaimed from the Thames as part of Joseph Bazalgette’s Embankment scheme, directly opposite the then newly completed Houses of Parliament. The serendipitous result of this is an ancient NHS hospital in a modern YRM building with arguably one of the most imposing views in the world afforded to its patients – but not all the hospital buildings on this campus have fared so well. Dr John Leake’s 1828 General Lying In Hospital sitting north from St Thomas’s on the corner of York and Addington roads – which delivered 150,000 babies and whose pioneering midwifery school was overseen by Florence Nightingale herself – lay abandoned for years, ending up on the Buildings at Risk register. Not long after £4m had been spent refurbishing it while owned by St Thomas’s, NHS Estates sold it to Whitbread in 2007 for £11M, which is now trying to turn this little piece of history into a 250 bed Premier Inn. Lambeth planners have no problem with this in principle – they’ve been actively encouraging hotel use in the area in their unitary development plan (UDP), amassing 900 rooms on this site since 1995 between Premier Inn, Marriott and Park Plaza.

Separating the Lying In Hospital from St Thomas’s is the ‘Island site’, formerly a reviled 1970s concrete office extension to County Hall, but now the site of a shining new plectrum-shaped structure. So what is it that’s about to complete on this prominent island site sitting opposite Big Ben on the south side of Westminster bridge? A shining new addition to the St Thomas’s campus procured through PFI? Perhaps it’s an office building – a Use Class that would certainly qualify in Lambeth’s UDP for the area. No. After years of architect’s proposals, planning committee wrangles, quango and mayoral intervention, it’s another hotel. But it’s one that will more than double the area’s provision – the 1037 bed, £350m, 68,500m2 Westminster Park Plaza and convention centre, opening this month.

The site has had a complex planning history. Both the island/Addington street and the north and south blocks on the other side of County Hall were bought by developer Frogmore in 1995. The latter was redeveloped into a 600 unit mixed use residential with Galliard Homes by architect BUJ in 2000, but the former, landlocked by roads but in full view of a World Heritage site, proved a much bigger challenge. In 1999 BUJ’s proposal just to reclad the concrete structure and add two storeys was given permission but not executed. Architect Gensler took it on between 2000-02, first proposing two office buildings ranging from eight to 14 storeys and connected by a bridge – but Lambeth planners refused it. Over the next two years Gensler juggled building heights in the hope of appeasing the various consultory bodies,  producing proposals ranging from eight to 28 storeys. At one point then mayor Ken Livingstone sought a tall tower, while English Heritage was keen to ensure no building compromised the eaves height of County Hall. Cabe put its oar in too, with the only design review report in the public realm from July 2000 emphasising a need for ‘architecture of the highest quality… to have a civic presence’. The report questioned the bridge proposal and the nature of the public realm in a relatively hostile urban environment, suggesting ‘an alternative which surrounded an open space with new building elements might create a better open space’ – a prophetic comment as it turned out. In 2001 a 12-storey office scheme, set to be approved by Lambeth, was called in by the Mayor’s Office and refused – a decision upheld on appeal to the secretary of state. Time rolled on. In mid-2003 Frogmore, Galliard and Park Plaza formed a joint venture, Marlbray Ltd, to develop the island with an apartment hotel proposal. Gensler was replaced, and the firm responsible for the 13 storey, 743 room hotel design that secured permission in February 2004 was none other than the original architect of the mixed-use residential refurb behind County Hall – BUJ. 

And who is BUJ, you might ask? It was moving its office from central London to the Docklands when I got in touch – back into the environment that, since 1983, it has helped to shape. Practice partner James Urquhart explains that the firm’s expertise was in hotel and residential, with most of its schemes ranging from £10-£60m and set in Limehouse, Poplar, the Isle of Dogs and Bermondsey. In its 27 year existence Urquhart and his partners have built an impressive array of clients, like Frogmore, Galliard, Berkeley Homes, Land Sec and Copthorne. This has given them design control over significant areas of London, most recently securing permission last June for 250 City Road: 45,000m2 of offices and retail, over 700 flats, a hotel and student accommodation.

The workaday way by which he reels off current projects in the middle of a deep recession is strangely refreshing. It’s not great architecture, but it has a proven track record, having been delivered on time and on budget, and you feel this no-nonsense approach has appealed to his big clients. This is evidenced in the numerous changes and resubmissions made by the designers at the client’s behest, that took the hotel from 743 rooms to a staggeringly dense 1037 in November 2007, involving the addition of three extra floors and the reduction of slab to slab heights to mitigate the effect.

The firm also showed rigour during the shell and core works. This was top down, with the building going up as the diggers created four extra basement levels with 2,500m2 conference facilities using megatrusses with clear 32m spans to make, at 1200m2, the largest ballroom in London. Fast-track construction entailed slip-form cores to minimise crane use, and tunnel form allowed walls and slabs to be cast in alignment in single pours. Two huge, 14 storey-high Vierendeel girder structures spanning the building’s three cores from the second floor upwards define the ‘V’ of the main atrium. All the floors were hung off these girders, allowing cantilevers up to 10m around the building’s edge. Pre-fabrication techniques for the bathrooms ensured pod constructions were assembled and finished offsite and then merely hauled in, slotted into place and connected to the mains and stack. In all, this cut a year from the programme, reducing construction time to two and a half years. Contractor Gear, in a joint venture with Park Plaza, took control of the interior specification and fit-out and managed the project.

So what of the building’s form? In plan the building is a heart, the central V-shaped atrium that defines the window lines of some of the ‘inner’ rooms opening out to the view of Big Ben, with the three cores marking its extremities. Around this wraps the doughnut of rooms, their circulation running on the inner face, with views extending to the outside. Resolving the disparity of the geometries between are two further atria either side of the main entrance atrium. These are used purely to get light into the inner rooms on the ‘V’, and to the circulation ring for apartments on the outside. Ground to second floors contain reception areas and restaurants, and basement areas are dedicated to the tailored conference facilities. Externally, Chinese cladding company Yuanda has built and fitted the full height unitised cladding system, triple glazed to deal with both traffic noise and solar gain, and coloured glass fins bring a staccato rhythm to the facade. As part of the Section 106, agreed highway works resulted in the part peninsularisation of the island site, connecting it directly with Westminster Bridge – a highly positive move in an unforgiving environment. 

In terms of the appointment, pre-fabrication has ensured rooms have a good interior specification – as indeed they should since shares in the apartment hotel rooms will cost anything from £200,000 to £4m each – but the sheer density of the building generates a new form of totally internalised space. The inner suites effectively have no direct external view, although some get an askew glimpse of Big Ben via the conditioned space of the main atrium.

But it is those two internal lightwells that leave the biggest impression: 14 floors of fully glazed and air conditioned bedrooms on both sides of the building gaze into a completely internalised and virtually hidden arc of space – one of Brave New World bizarreness. Looking down from the penthouse suites it induces a sense of mild awe, but as I viewed it from the bottom, it was the only time Gear’s otherwise consummately professional project architect, Rebecca McArthur, looked vaguely ill at ease. Studying the frosted glass wall separating the space from the outer doughnut of accommodation circulation she admitted the contractor was working with consultants on how to light the space better. I hesitated to suggest artist James Turrell, feeling he wouldn’t come in within budget or simply may not be suitable for creating the soma-like visuals the wall will have to generate. But perhaps I’m being a Luddite. Internal bedrooms could be the way to go – Westminster granted planning permission for a pod hotel last month in London’s Trocadero, and no windows at all are proposed for some of its 500 bedrooms.

So through the pursuit of profit, and following due process and planning policy, we finally have a hotel and conference centre. It’s not a bad-looking behemoth, uses biomass, and its conference nature alludes to the discussion and debate that are the founding principles of democracy in the Houses of Parliament opposite.

But you’re left wondering what could have been. With the benefit of hindsight, and in an ideal world where prime state-owned property was not sold off to private investors, I imagined a different use for that island site. Could it not have been a teaching hospital facility, or the much needed Waterloo Primary Care Centre identified in Lambeth’s latest Core Strategy Proposal, at long last connecting St Thomas’s and its Florence Nightingale Museum with the General Lying In Hospital via a new, user friendly public space? A historically attuned, civic-scaled medical campus dedicated to physical wellbeing, counterpointing the political campus opposite. I think Nightingale could rest easy with that. Instead what we have is fast becoming one of London’s major hotel enclaves. If Florence is turning in her grave, there’s one thing she can be sure of – there’s certainly no shortage of beds.