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For Ken Livingstone, it was the glass testicle. For his successor as mayor of London, Boris Johnson, it was the glass gonad. But whatever part of the male anatomy it was being compared to, the distinctively shaped City Hall on London’s South Bank had one clear function: It was the centre of democracy when it came to running London. That is not the case anymore. And that creates an intriguing problem.
The decision by current Mayor Sadiq Khan to move the operations of his office and the Greater London Authority from City Hall to the Crystal building further east in London’s docklands at the end of next year is a financial one: The rent on the building is £11M a year, and Khan said the decision to move to the GLA-owned Crystal will save £126M over the next decade.
But that financial decision creates a property problem for the City Hall building’s owner, St Martin’s Property, the real estate division of the Kuwait Investment Authority, the Gulf state’s sovereign wealth fund.
The very specific design of the 185K SF building makes it difficult to repurpose. But from that difficulty could come the next stage in the evolution of a district that has for centuries epitomised London’s capacity to reinvent and reinterpret itself.“Any new occupier will likely have to come out of…
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