130 Fenchurch Street: the public floor is in the middle of the tower, which is the hard place to put it

ARCHITECTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 9 min

Every tall building in the City now arrives with a public space attached. Almost all of them put it on the roof, because the roof is the one floor nobody was going to let anyway. WilkinsonEyre’s approved tower for Fenchurch Street puts its public level in the middle of the stack, and that is a considerably more difficult thing to do.

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130 Fenchurch Street received planning approval from the City of London Corporation in September 2025. It is designed by WilkinsonEyre and developed by CO-RE for Aviva Investors, with DP9 as planning consultant.

The scheme rises to 34 storeys and around 146 metres, with 31 floors of office space, ground floor retail and hospitality, and roughly 600 square metres of new landscaped public realm at street level connecting Cullum Street to Fen Court. Demolition of the existing Fountain House is expected to begin in 2026, with completion anticipated around 2030.

The detail worth stopping on sits at level 17: a public viewing gallery and exhibition space, roughly halfway up the building.

That sounds like a familiar piece of City planning gain until you think about where it is. Level 17 of 31 office floors is prime lettable area. It is high enough for a proper view, low enough to be comfortably serviced, and squarely in the part of the stack that commands the best rents. Giving it away is not the same gesture as giving away a roof.

Fountain House was a first, and the site has form

The building being replaced deserves its introduction, because it explains why this address keeps producing new office models.

Fountain House was built between 1954 and 1958, designed by W.H. Rogers with Sir Howard Robertson as consulting architect. It was the first building in London constructed to the tower and podium formula: a low horizontal block filling the plot, with a slender tower rising from it.

That arrangement was not invented here. It came from Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House in New York, completed in 1952, and Pevsner records Fountain House as repeating its motif. What matters is the speed. Six years after Lever House, the American office model had been translated into a City of London street with almost triangular podium corners cut to fit the medieval plot lines.

Fountain House was, in other words, the building that brought a new idea of what an office could be into the Square Mile. Its podium occupied the full site and the tower took only a small proportion of it, which was a generous way to use expensive land and a completely different economic logic from the one that operates today.

So the site has form. Seventy years on, the same plot is being used to work out the next version of the same question, which is what a large office building should give back to the street it stands on.

One street, three answers

Here is the thing nobody has pointed out, and it is unusually neat.

Fenchurch Street now holds three tall buildings, each with a different answer to the question of public access at height.

20 Fenchurch Street, Rafael Viñoly’s building, opened its Sky Garden in 2015 across levels 35 to 37. The public space is the crown. It sits above everything, it is the last thing in the section, and it is reached by dedicated lifts from a separate ground floor entrance. Free, but booked in advance.

120 Fenchurch Street, Eric Parry Architects’ Fen Court, opened The Garden at 120 in 2019 on the 15th floor. The public space is the podium roof, planted with wisteria, roses, hydrangeas and a long water feature. It is the largest free rooftop garden in the City, open all year, and it needs no booking at all.

130 Fenchurch Street proposes its public gallery and exhibition space at level 17, with 31 floors of offices around and above it. The public space is neither the crown nor the podium roof. It is a floor cut out of the middle of the commercial stack.

Three buildings, one street, three positions in the section: the top, the podium roof, and the middle. Read together they are a decade-long experiment in where a City tower can put its public room, and the third one is the most demanding.

Why the middle is the difficult place

A roof garden is generous but it is also, structurally and commercially, the easy option.

The roof of a tower is not lettable office space. Putting a garden there means giving up plant area and a bit of height, and taking on the cost of irrigation, wind mitigation, planting and maintenance. Those are real costs and the results at both 20 and 120 Fenchurch Street are genuinely good. But nobody was going to rent the roof.

A public floor at level 17 costs something quite different.

It costs a floor plate. One of the best floor plates in the building, in the middle of the tower where the view has arrived but the lifts are still quick.

It complicates the core. Visitors have to reach level 17 without moving through tenanted floors, which usually means a dedicated lift or a reserved lift zone running from a separate ground floor entrance to a single stop. That lift shaft occupies core area on every floor it passes, whether or not it opens there.

It complicates the fire and security strategies. A building with a public floor in its middle has to evacuate two different populations who do not know each other, from a level surrounded by private tenancies, and it has to keep them separated in normal operation.

It complicates the letting. Tenants on levels 16 and 18 are immediately above and below a floor with a public audience on it, with all the servicing and lift traffic that implies.

None of that is a reason not to do it. It is a list of the things somebody has agreed to solve, and it is why the decision is worth writing about. The public room at 130 Fenchurch Street is not a leftover at the top of the section. It has been cut into the most valuable part of the building, and every consequence of that has to be designed around.

That is a considerably more serious commitment than a roof terrace, and it is the reason this scheme is architecturally more interesting than its silhouette suggests.

The ground is doing the other half of the work

The second move is at street level, and it inverts what Fountain House did.

Fountain House put a podium across the entire plot. The building met the ground as a continuous block with retail along the frontage and a central entrance foyer, which was the standard of its moment and which reads today as a solid edge.

The new scheme takes roughly 600 square metres of the site and gives it back as landscaped public realm, with a pedestrian route running through from Cullum Street to Fen Court.

Look at where that route lands. Fen Court is the address of Eric Parry’s 120 Fenchurch Street, which is to say the new route delivers people directly to the foot of the building with the free roof garden in it. Two schemes by different architects, twenty years apart, are being stitched into a single pedestrian sequence through a part of the City whose street pattern is medieval and whose blocks are otherwise almost impermeable.

That is city-making rather than site development, and it is the kind of gain that is easy to undervalue in a planning statement because it does not photograph well. A new through-route in this part of EC3 is worth more to the daily experience of the district than another terrace.

The ground floor also carries retail and hospitality with what the developers describe as a culturally activated frontage. The test of that will be whether it stays open outside office hours, which in this part of the City is the difference between a street and a corridor.

The cultural programme started before the building

One more thing worth noting, because it is a relatively new practice and this scheme has used it well.

Seed130 is a temporary cultural programme running on the site through the planning and pre-construction period, bringing in poets, writers and scientists. It began during the consultation phase and has continued since.

Developers have used meanwhile uses for years, usually as hoardings with graphics on them. Programming a site with people for the years between consultation and completion is a different proposition. It builds an audience for the finished building’s public floor before the public floor exists, and it gives the City’s Destination City ambitions something to point at during the long gap when a site is a hole in the ground.

For a scheme whose central public offer is an exhibition space, starting the exhibitions five years early is a coherent piece of thinking rather than a marketing exercise.

The market the building is being made for

Worth setting out the numbers, because they explain why a scheme of this ambition is being built now.

Knight Frank has reported availability of newly built, sustainable office space in the City at around 0.5 per cent. The City of London Corporation is targeting an additional 1.2 million square metres of office space by 2040 under its City Plan.

Those two figures together describe a market where the supply of the specific product occupiers now want, which is new, highly rated, well serviced space with amenity attached, is close to nonexistent, while the planning authority is actively seeking a great deal more of it.

130 Fenchurch Street is one of three Aviva Investors schemes in the City, alongside One Liverpool Street and 101 Moorgate, which tells you this is a portfolio position rather than a one-off bet.

For an architecture reader the relevant point is what that market does to briefs. When the scarce commodity is not floor area but floor area with a public and cultural dimension attached, the amenity stops being a planning concession and becomes part of the product. A public gallery at level 17 is, in that light, both a genuine civic gesture and a rational commercial decision. Those two things being aligned is precisely why it is likely to get built as drawn.

What to watch for

Three things will tell you whether the scheme delivers what the drawings promise.

Whether level 17 is genuinely easy to enter. The Sky Garden requires a booking. The Garden at 120 does not, and it is the better public space for exactly that reason. The entrance arrangement and the booking policy at 130 will decide whether its public floor is a civic room or a managed attraction.

Whether the Cullum Street to Fen Court route stays open. Through-routes in the City are frequently gated outside working hours. An open route here would connect two public spaces at height through a block that currently has neither.

Whether the ground floor holds the evening. Culturally activated is a phrase that has to survive contact with a district that empties at seven o’clock. If it does, this corner of Fenchurch Street becomes something the City has been trying to produce for a decade.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The easy version of this story is a skyline story. Another City tower, 146 metres, a crown at the top, twelfth tallest in the Square Mile.

The version worth keeping is a section drawing. Seventy years ago this site took delivery of the American tower and podium and gave the City its first example of it. What replaces it puts a public room at level 17, cut out of the most valuable part of the building, and runs a new pedestrian route through the block to the foot of the neighbour with the free roof garden on it.

Two buildings on the same street already answered the question of public space at height by going to the top. This one goes to the middle, which costs more, complicates the core, and puts the public inside the working building rather than above it.

That is a more generous answer, and a harder one to draw. It will be worth going back in 2030 to see whether it survived the value engineering.