03 March 2016
Once Again, From the Top
by J.R.Thomas
As the A303, the old high road from London to nowhere in particular in the west, sweeps its way past Stonehenge and across the Wiltshire Downs, it passes a minor turning marked “Bishop’s Fonthill”. Follow the lane and at the end is one of those estate villages that look as if they have been carved from butter and are polished and scrubbed daily. Almost immediately to the right is revealed a magnificent stone arch flanked by ashlar walls. It will lead, you must surmise, to some great ducal palace. But drive through and all that is revealed is a meandering lake, chalky fields, a rolling wooded and agricultural landscape.
Yet, at the very end of the eighteenth century this was the scene of frantic and enormous construction activity. Nearly a thousand workers were toiling in the wooded valley to build a house, Fonthill Abbey, which was to be one of the largest and certainly the highest in the British Isles. The client was William Beckford, son of an enormously wealthy Lord Mayor of London, inheritor of this estate and vast West Indian sugar plantations at the age of ten, and an enthusiastic amateur architect. He was in fact a very dangerous phenomenon, an enthusiastic amateur architect with almost unlimited wealth. His house was to be defined by a gothic tower that would rise higher than the surrounding hills and stare stonily across Wiltshire.
It seems that what Beckford was aiming at was to surpass the height of Salisbury Cathedral spire, about twenty miles away, and at 404 feet (123 metres) the tallest building in England. The two towers, spiritual and domestic, would have been clearly visible to each other on a clear day, but it was not to be. The Fonthill Tower had reached 300 feet when it collapsed. A detail like that was not going to put Beckford off. He immediately started again. At 300 feet once again, history repeated itself; and the tower collapsed. But nothing stops the man with an urge to build a tower, and Beckford immediately started once more. Prudently, this time he stopped at about 180 feet. He also managed to finish the rest of the house. Even the Beckford money could not withstand this scale of construction and reconstruction. His fortune was mostly gone, his bankers pressing, and after living in a couple of rooms for a few years he gave up and sold the house. The new owner moved in but about four years later the tower collapsed for a third and final time, demolishing a large part of the house with it.
You might think that Beckford’s awful example would be taken on board by property developers the world over, that any prospective real estate constructor with that glint in his eye would be read in his crib the terrible tale of Fonthill, and admonished to keep whatever he might build low and simple. Yet, the urge to build ever higher seems to be deep in men’s souls (and it is men, women seem to have much more sense.)
Modern technology also means that generally our generation of towers do not collapse when under construction or after, even though they can be much higher than what Beckford was aiming for. The current ten highest skyscrapers, a more and more apt nickname, are all more than four times higher than where Beckford was aiming, and the highest, the Burj Khalifa, is 2,717 feet, more than half a mile high (or, less dramatically, 828 metres). The danger now is not that towers will suddenly cascade down onto their neighbours, but that the money will run out and bankrupt their proud sponsors.
Every so often a phenomenon shakes the world. Not hurricanes, not volcanic explosions, not tidal waves. Every so often the property business all around the world gets itself into the state where not only has it the urge to build ever taller buildings, but it can raise the money to do so. Rents rise, yields fall, construction costs are benign, planning authorities become open to radical approaches providing lots of extra space. And bankers, innocent easily swayed sheep as they so often are, see all this happening and assume that this time these happy trends will continue for ever; and agree to finance a new generation of towers, for offices or residential or hotels, or in many cases, all three.
Property development is a dangerous business, prone to violent and sudden cycles, and difficult to predict. It requires large amounts of capital – equity – and then further vast amounts of other people’s money, preferably from banks – debt. Oddly, it also seems to attract entrepreneurs who have very little money. The highly stacked glittering prizes for getting it right overcome the risk of losing what little they have, so if they can persuade others (and property entrepreneurs tend to be especially equipped with persuasive powers) to put extra equity and huge bundles of debt into a project, then our gifted but relatively impecunious developer is in the high rise business.
So the money pours in and the tide rises higher and faster. Most of us from Canute onwards know what happens to tides. They come in, they go out. Towers take a long time to build and cannot be occupied until most of the works are complete. If the benign tide of rents and yields reverses before the building is finished and let and occupied, suddenly it can all go horribly wrong. Somebody notices that most of these new buildings are empty or the economy has gone into recession or the future has moved east, and the tide goes out much faster than any seaside ebb ever retreats. Maybe somebody even points out that towers are inherently inefficient – the increasing amount of space in ever higher reaching buildings required to move people and goods and water and waste up and down means that less and less of the tower is actually capable of occupation; and the complexity of the technical parts of the building, to say nothing of its foundations, become greater – and more expensive – at the same rate as the lettable area declines. The bankers scream with horror, the equity providers become frantic to get their money back out. The wiser entrepreneurs and bankers will have designed their financial structures as the wise architects and engineers have designed their physical structure, ensuring that nothing can collapse. So at least, hopefully, (but often not) the building will get finished and be capable of attracting some tenants.
We have been riding a spring tide in the property market and the next generation of towers is rising to reflect the benign economic climate. We have commented before in these pages on tower construction in London, but it is nothing as to what is going on in the Far East and especially China. The five tallest buildings in the world are in China. And yet more are on their way. Or possibly not. Hard information is always difficult to come by in Chinese commerce but well informed rumour is that things are sufficiently bad in the Chinese property market that several towers have stopped construction, including Sky City, which would have become the world’s tallest building, 10 metres higher that the Burj Khalifa, and located close to the birth place of Mao Zedong, modern China’s founder and great leader.
Some economists, semi-jokingly one hopes, say that the construction of towers releases a curse that immediately causes a downturn in the property market. That would be an appealingly wacky idea in the colourless world of economics. But the reality is more that towers take so long to prepare and construct that the brief coincident conditions which enable them to start, generally pass before they are completed.
Oh, and Beckford? He moved to Lansdown Crescent, in Bath, buying also Lansdown Hill behind his house. On that hill he built a tower, 150 feet high, classical this time rather than gothic. Unlike Fonthill, that tower still stands and is known as Beckford’s Tower. His only regret was that he had not built it 40 feet higher.
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