What's In A Name? Skyscraper Takes Branding To A Whole New Level
A Manchester tower is to take naming to a new level: It is going to be named after a concept.
What was until recently the 26-storey CIS Tower — named after its occupier, Co-Operative Insurance Services — has been renamed Society.
Owner Castlebrooke Investments, advised by Colliers, chose the name to mark completion of the 425K SF office building’s refurbishment.
“Society is a celebration of all Manchester was, is and can be,” Colliers Director and Head of National Office Agency Michael Hawkins said. “Castlebrooke’s redevelopment and rebranding of this important building respects its rich heritage, with a subtle nod to its origins as the home of the Co-Operative Insurance Society since the 1960s, while also positioning the building to cater for current and future occupier requirements, creating an environment that meets the diverse needs of Manchester’s ever-evolving business community.”
Society jostles for space on the Manchester skyline with functional names like City Tower, or geographic designations like Deansgate Square.
In the UK building names are ultimately a matter for decision by the local council with input from the Royal Mail.
Naming buildings after their occupiers — normal practise in the U.S. — is generally regarded as advertising in the UK, which councils frown upon. Monuments to human ego are also discouraged — there is no Trump Tower or equivalent in the Square Mile.
Where towers apparently have branded names at various times in their histories — like the BT Tower, Swiss Re Tower or NatWest Tower — this is unofficial, casual or conversational. Those towers are, respectively, addressed as 60 Cleveland Street, 30 St Mary Axe and 25 Old Broad Street.
In Manchester the 47-storey Beetham Tower — named for its developer — is addressed as 301 Deansgate.
The tension between public usage and official fact has resulted in some famous disputes.
An application to rename the 755-foot-tall Heron Tower, London EC2, after Salesforce, the San Francisco-based cloud computing business, caused upset in 2014. The local council noted that Salesforce occupied only about one-sixth of the 440K SF office floorspace, which they regarded as insufficient to justify naming rights. The result was an uneasy compromise in which the tower is unofficially called Salesforce Tower, and the council regards it as 110 Bishopsgate. The address is often given as “Salesforce Tower at 110 Bishopsgate”.
To add to the confusion, Salesforce Tower’s website is Herontower.com retaining the original name given, temporarily, by the building’s developer, the Heron Corporation.
