The City of London Corporation has approved two new office towers at 130 Fenchurch Street, clearing the way to demolish the ageing block known as Fountain House. In 2023, a mock-up of the City’s skyline in 2030 already showed 11 extra towers, approved or under construction.
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What replaces Fountain House
Fountain House went up between 1954 and 1958, on a former bomb site, and was one of the first tall office blocks the City built after the Blitz. Architects W H Rogers and Sir Howard Robertson designed it with an eye on New York’s Lever House, and it later housed a run of insurance and finance firms. Architects WilkinsonEyre have drawn its replacement: a 31-storey tower and a 34-storey tower, holding 58,000 square metres of office space between them, plus a publicly accessible cultural space and a garden terrace. The existing block was due to come down in 2026, with the new scheme finished by 2030.
Tom Sleigh, who chairs the Corporation’s planning and transportation committee, said the scheme would deliver “jobs, public space, and best-in-class offices.” Ben Littman, who leads development at co-developer Aviva Investors, called it a “bold and thoughtful scheme” for a site that had sat empty for years.
A wider pipeline of towers
The Fenchurch Street approval follows a run of applications that has kept City planners busy. The City logged 1,023 planning applications in the twelve months to September 2023, against 820 the year before. The Corporation was negotiating proposals for more than 500,000 square metres of extra office space at the time, with another 500,000 square metres already under construction. Shravan Joshi, who chaired the planning and transportation committee then, said there was room for further towers east of the current cluster and around Fleet Street.
The tower still to come
The tallest building the pipeline will produce is 1 Undershaft, a 74-storey redesign by architect Eric Parry for developer Stanhope. At 309.6 metres it would match The Shard and overtake the City’s current record-holder, 22 Bishopsgate, at 278 metres. The scheme replaces the 1970s-built St Helen’s Tower and adds a public podium garden cantilevered 46 metres above street level, with floor space reserved for the Museum of London. Construction was due to start in 2026. In December 2024, planning officers backed the revised design, despite Historic England calling it “arguably worse” than the earlier proposal.
Both schemes are due to be finished by 2030.
