If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

There are three landmarks on the London skyline.

If I’d said that a century ago, they would have been Tower Bridge, the Tower of London and St Paul’s. Today it’s Canary Wharf in the east, the BT Tower in the west end, and Tower 42 in the city.

I’ve done BT Tower before, from which you get a great view of London. It bowled me over at the time, and I filled a whole memory card with pictures. Oxford Street. Baker Street. The BBC. Regents Park.

Today, though, I did Tower 42 and it all paled in comparison It even beats the London Eye, hands down. Absolutely no question about it, even though I was only on the 24th floor - just above half way to the 42nd floor penthouse seafood bar.

With 20 lifts, it was the tallest building in the UK for ten years until the buildings on Canary Wharf stole its crown. It took nine years to build, between 1971 and 1980 was was finally opened a year later by the Queen. The shape, nonsensical when seen from street level, is the Nat West logo when seen from the air, for it was built as the bank’s HQ. They may have sold it, but most Londoners still call it the Nat West Tower.

The entrance hall is a three-level greenhouse, on the upper floor of which a long reception desk stretches out towards some airport-worthy security measures. X-ray machines for your bag. Metal detectors for your body and clothes.

Then they give you a funny swipe card they never took back. I wonder what it does.

I rode the express lift to the 24th floor, where the doors open out into the marble-floored core of the building - a curved triangle from which the floor sections open up. I’ve always wondered what it was like on the inside.

And so, of course, I took a seat by one of the floor-to-ceiling windows for the meeting, the capital stretching out a couple of hundred feet below, as far as the eye could see. The BT Tower looked very lonely, standing on its own in the middle of the metropolis.

As the afternoon wore on, the sun moved around so that it was warming the side of the building on which we were sitting. The steel trimmings that run up and down its outer shell and gleam as the light falls upon them, creaked and cracked as they were gently heated, then did the same again as they cooled and we filed out, casting glances back across our shoulders at the view.

Shouldn’t all meetings have a backdrop like that?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 27th, 2003 at 11:17 pm and is filed under Journal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.