Peter Murray OBE, one of the most rigorous observers of London’s built environment, has a blunt verdict on how the city decides where its tallest buildings rise.
“We have a really daft way of arranging tall buildings.”
That is Peter’s verdict on a system that lets each of London’s 33 boroughs decide, on its own, where a tower can go. A tall building does not stop shaping the city at a borough boundary. It reshapes long-distance views, the skyline and the character of London well beyond the plot it sits on. Height, he has argued for a decade, is a metropolitan question.
Treating it as one:
- Concentrates the tallest buildings in specifically identified locations.
- Lets established clusters such as the City and Canary Wharf keep evolving.
- Stops treating every tower application as an isolated exception to be fought borough by borough.
- Defines where metropolitan-scale density is wanted, then lets development follow.
The draft London Plan, published in July 2026 and open for consultation until 15 October, sets out roughly 17 strategic locations for buildings of 100 metres and above, and redefines what counts as tall, dropping the threshold to 30 metres. It will not settle every argument about London’s skyline. But it is the first time the planning system has tried to answer the question Peter has been putting to it for years: not whether tall buildings belong, but where. This is a strategic decision for the Mayor not only for local boroughs.
What does planning uncertainty actually cost?
For investors and developers, the framework matters as much as the architecture. Capital goes in years before a building earns anything: land bought, finance arranged, risk priced, long before construction starts. An unpredictable planning system turns that wait into an extra cost.
“Uncertainty in the planning system is a big disincentive to investment and to developers generally.”
Investors do not need a guarantee that every application will be approved. They need to understand the rules, and reasonable confidence that a credible project will not spend years immobilised in bureaucracy.
Height is only the most visible part of a wider case Peter makes about how London should grow.
- Clearer rules for where towers belong.
- Greater confidence in mid-rise housing delivered at real scale.
- Local centres doing more of the work the city already asks of them.
- Buildings designed to change use rather than become obsolete.
None of these are radical positions. They are ideas London has circled for decades without fully acting on.
Does every building have to look different?
Housing is the more fundamental challenge, and addressing it at scale requires the industry to question one of contemporary architecture’s strongest instincts: the desire for difference.
On difficult urban sites, that instinct has obvious value. London is full of irregular plots, historical constraints and complex relationships with existing neighbourhoods. Skilled design solves problems that standard solutions cannot. But treating every residential block as a completely bespoke exercise becomes hard to justify when the goal is volume.
Peter’s counterargument is historical, and he makes it as a friend of the profession, not a critic of it.
“The problem is architects always want to do everything slightly differently. That is an argument I have with the profession, as much as I support it.”
London has done this before, at scale. Much of eighteenth-century London was built from repeatable types, similar internal plans and modest façade variations. Those streets did not become less desirable for it. Many have remained successful for 250 years.
The implication is not that London should abandon architecture for standardised boxes. The focus of design can shift from the individual object to the quality of the neighbourhood. Once residential types become more repeatable, placemaking carries more of the load: streets, public spaces, landscape, connections, amenities and the relationships between buildings.
This matters particularly as London begins to work with parts of the grey belt, land inside the green belt that, in Peter’s description, lacks the same natural or landscape quality. Larger, less constrained sites allow more repetition than complicated inner-city plots.
Combined with what he calls gentle density, in his framing six to twelve storeys rather than towers, this creates a third option between low-density sprawl and high-rise urbanism.
Does London’s 15-minute city already exist?
The international debate around the 15-minute city has focused largely on Paris. Peter’s argument is that London already has most of what the model requires, and has had it for decades.
The city developed around an extensive network of high streets, neighbourhood centres and larger commercial nodes. He cites a statistic that no address in London is more than ten minutes from a high street. The challenge is not to invent a new urban system but to strengthen what already exists:
- Improve local services and amenities around established centres.
- Increase residential density near those same nodes.
- Allow different centres to grow at different scales, the largest absorbing height, secondary centres taking additional density, local neighbourhoods becoming more complete.
For developers, that broadens the geography of opportunity. For residents, it brings more daily needs within reach without concentrating all growth in central London.
Are buildings economic infrastructure?
Behind debates about housing and towers sits a broader argument that often goes unstated.
Buildings, in his account, are not the physical consequence of economic activity. They make that activity possible. Offices create the conditions for companies and industries to cluster. Housing allows workers to live within reach of employment. Transport and public space connect the two.
Canary Wharf illustrates the principle at scale: a concentration of commercial space that supports financial and professional activity far beyond what existed there before. Peter puts its contribution to the UK economy at around £48 billion a year. The structural argument matters more than the precise number: if London cannot provide the quality and quantity of space that globally mobile businesses need, those businesses go elsewhere. Without developments of that kind, he suggests, Frankfurt might have taken a very different position in Europe’s financial geography.
“Buildings become absolutely fundamental to economic stability and growth.”
Seen this way, planning reform is economic policy, not property policy. A persistent shortage of Grade A space does not only inconvenience developers or occupiers. At sufficient scale, it shapes the competitiveness of the city itself.
What does it mean for a building to learn?
Buildings only work as economic infrastructure for as long as they keep up with what is asked of them.
London already contains buildings designed around assumptions that are becoming obsolete. Office requirements evolve, technology changes, environmental standards rise and floorplates sized for large banking occupiers no longer match the market. The question is what to do about it.
Peter points to 8 Canada Square, the Canary Wharf tower built for HSBC, as a different kind of answer. Rather than treating the existing structure as disposable, the Kohn Pedersen Fox scheme reworks it for hotel, commercial and retail use while retaining significant elements of what is already there.
“Buildings that learn and change are really important now.”
That reframes what a building is worth. Instead of asking only how efficiently it serves its first occupier, investors can ask how many different futures the same structure might support. Buildings routinely outlive the business models they were designed for. Designing solely for first use embeds future obsolescence from the start.
London’s next phase of growth is unlikely to be defined by a single architectural idea.
- Strategic clusters can provide a rational home for height.
- Mid-rise housing and repeatable building types can deliver density without turning every district into towers.
- Existing local centres can absorb more growth because the polycentric structure is already there.
- Existing buildings can be treated as adaptable urban resources rather than disposable products.
The common denominator is clarity: enough control to protect long-term public value, enough certainty for investment to proceed, and enough flexibility for buildings and neighbourhoods to change when the assumptions behind them do.
Where the argument continues
These arguments do not resolve in articles. They need a room where the people making the decisions are willing to put their positions under pressure.
Peter, an Honorary Fellow of the RIBA and a Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat Lifetime Achievement laureate, moderates Canvas I, Vision, at b2bv2v26 London on Tuesday 8 September: where does London grow next, and who decides? Doors open at 14:00, with two further canvases after it. The SkyScraper Dialogue is the panel we are building, putting the developers behind The Shard & the Burj Khalifa in conversation with a third skyline; invitations are out, and a name appears only once it is agreed. Value closes the evening, on capital.
This is Edition II of the Dialogue of Skyscrapers, after Warsaw, on the eve of PropTech Connect week. The room is deliberately small: a curated gathering of senior leaders from real estate, investment, banking, architecture and development.
Tickets are on sale at RealTimes.co.