22 dwarfs 42

A year ago I did a posting about Twentytwo Bishopsgate, which is about to be the tallest Big Thing in the City of London Big Thing Clump. It featured this explanatory image of what was then about to happen to that Big City Clump:

I’m not sure what the current status of “1 Undershaft” is just now, which is potentially the biggest Big City Thing of the lot. I seem to recall reading that there were delays. The internet now seems rather coy about this project. 22 Bishopsgate, however, is roaring upwards.

And no photo I have so far taken of 22 Bishopsgate illustrates the scale of this roar better than this one, which I took yesterday, when on my way from Angel to the City, which means that I was approaching the Big City Clump from a northerly direction:

What we see there is what used to be one of the City’s biggest Big Things, the NatWest Tower, or “Tower 42” as they now want us to call it. Behind it, dwarfing it, still not as big as it will be, is 22 Bishopsgate.

When I took this photo, such is my eyesight that I wasn’t sure if I was looking at the actual Tower 42, or a reflection of it in the glass surface of 22 Bishopsgate. It just seemed too small to be the actual Big Thing itself. But clearly, it is.

In the graphic above with all the names, Tower 42 is now so small and so antique that it doesn’t even get named. It’s the dark one on the left, behind where it says “Mitsubishi Tower”.

Originally posted at Brian Micklethwait’s Old Blog

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *