CentrePoint - a new page - or back full circle?

I currently work in the 27th tallest building in London, and a landmark in central London. Built in 1966, Centrepoint has been many things to many people. But for my company and I it has most recently been a workplace. All that is about to change as the building is set to undergo a major change. Its set to become plush new housing, so today is our last day in the building before heading off for a new page of our own on Friday.

Growing up in London you can't miss the rather drab looking building that towers over the end of Oxford street, marking the end of London's best known shopping street, it also sits on a road that through the 90's could guarantee a bargain for techies, yet turn your eye half a turn and you find the luvies of theater land. Location wise you couldn't find a better place to provide 32 floors of offices, yet it stood empty for years. As a child I never understood this and I wasn't alone, it proved to be controversial in a number of ways but the developers where effectively speculating on the chance of finding a single tenant. This led to the government offering to buy the building for 5 million pounds, maybe if we had bought it in 1972 we could now have afforded to buy another couple of banks. It eventually became the home of the CBI and a number of other tenants, ourselves included.

Homeless Charity

Another side to the building was the link to the homeless charity and again growing up I couldn't work out how a homeless charity could afford to build a huge building like this and keep it empty. At one stage I even thought that it was the worlds largest Homeless hostel and that the entrance was a rather salubrious snooker hall. In 1974 local activists aimed to squat inside the building to draw attention to the plight of the homeless and reasoning that an empty building such as this should be used for the benefit of the homeless. Around this time the homeless charity Centrepoint was born. It seems the link is purely co-incidental but its rather a good story to think of it as a reaction to the excesses of property speculation that led to the building of a concrete empty building and contrasting to the hundreds of homeless people sleeping on the cold streets within its Shadow.

Its design too is controversial and rather Brutalist, its just Glass and concrete jutting up from the ground rather, well, brutally. Modern sky scrappers like the Shard and the Gherkin are for me far more beautiful. But the building is Grade 2 listed and has won plaudits for it rather uncompromising style. Its certainly deemed nice enough to be suitable for its next phase of life as a home for the rich. One things for sure the views from the building are like no other in the London, and therefore the world. London's newer Skyscrapers are grouped together in the east, but Centrepoint stands alone right in the middle and offers 360 degree views in to the heart of the worlds greatest City.

Future 

So its not really a surprise that the future for the building takes it back in one sense to its controversial roots. Where as the property boom of the 60's and 70's provided profit opportunities even for an empty office building. The property boom now provides a profit opportunity for largely empty housing. Whilst the plans do include obligatory affordable housing, largely the tower itself will be Luxury flats all I'm sure will be sold for in excess of a million pounds. When you look around London at that property band most houses remain empty for 90% of the time operating as a base for the few days a year when the International owner has a meeting in London. So once again there will be a stark contrast between the super rich and the super poor sharing a single doorway. Its ironic that what was controversial back in the 70's is commonplace 50 years later.

One thing is for sure I'll miss the views, but not the rather complicated lifts.