Eric Parry’s Justice Quarter ‘demolition job’ slammed by chief climate adviser

In response, the chair of the UK’s Climate Change Committee, John Gummer, has called for new climate-focused planning laws.

The £240 million Salisbury Square development off Fleet Street, dubbed the Justice Quarter, involves replacing six historic buildings with three new ones, including a flagship seven-storey court building for Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunal Service (HMCTS) and the Ministry of Justice.

Developer and planning authority the City of London claims that the project will help it to ‘meet its targets to achieve net zero across the Square Mile by 2040’.

But an embodied carbon analysis carried out as part of AJ’s RetroFirst campaign by Philip Oldfield, director of the architecture programme at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, indicates that its demolition-hungry approach will result in an upfront carbon footprint more than 40 per cent higher than a strategy based on reusing the existing buildings.

John Gummer, chair of the Climate Change Committee who is also a Conservative peer and former environment secretary, called on the government to act urgently to prevent such projects winning planning permission and vowed to raise the example with housing secretary Michael Gove.

The Salisbury Square project was given planning permission in April and both London mayor Sadiq Khan and former housing secretary Robert Jenrick passed up the opportunity to call it in.

Oldfield’s analysis (see box below), suggests the Parry scheme is incompatible with the net zero promises of the government bodies pushing it through, including the UK government’s world-leading promise to slash CO₂ emissions by 78 per cent by 2035.

He estimated that Parry’s design will cost 19,180 more tonnes of CO₂e than an alternative scenario based on refurbishment and extension, an increase in emissions of 42 per cent.

According to the United Nations, the world must cut carbon emissions by 45 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030 to keep global warming below 1.5°C.

One of the three demands of the AJ’s RetroFirst campaign is that the government use policy levers such as the planning system to nudge developers and others towards reuse.

Gummer said: ‘I think these figures make the point about embodied carbon very effectively. The truth is we need to think differently. It’s not acceptable to pull buildings down like this. We have to learn to make do and mend.

‘Architects and others will always find a reason [for demolition]. We need to have a planning law which doesn’t give permission for these things. We are simply not going to win the battle against climate change unless we fight on every front.

‘The problem has been that we haven’t had ministers who have the will and the clout to develop these policies.’

Labour peer Larry Whitty – who has repeatedly highlighted the RetroFirst campaign to planning ministers in the Lords – said the country’s construction sector and planning system ‘seemed incapable’ of taking on board the crucial need to reduce embodied carbon.

‘There seems to be a systematic predilection amongst developers of regeneration of housing or office projects to go for the option of “demolish and rebuild”, leading to dramatically higher greenhouse gas emissions compared to retrofit options,’ he said.

‘The so-called Justice Quarter regeneration in the City of London is a clear case in point.

‘I have been arguing in the Lords for some time that there needs to be written into planning controls a compulsory requirement on architects, developers and owners, and on local authority planners to have considered a retrofit option and to calculate its carbon equivalent advantages over the demolition option. I call that the “comparative carbon assessment requirement”.

‘If we really believe in the climate emergency, we should be arguing with government, local authorities, industry and architects that they too should support that requirement.’

The Salisbury Square project involves the demolition of six historic but unlisted buildings in the Fleet Street Conservation Area.

Historic England objected in particular to the ‘unjustified’ demolition of 8 Salisbury Court, a narrow five-storey former warehouse dating from the late 19th or early 20th century; and 1 Salisbury Square, an early Georgian domestic house.

It also protested about the planned destruction of the 1920s newspaper office Chronicle House, designed by William Lee Clarke and the architect behind the Grade II-listed former Daily Mail building, Herbert Owen Ellis.

SAVE Britain’s Heritage has been campaigning against the Salisbury Square project, which its director Henrietta Billlings branded a ‘government and City-backed demolition job’ which was wrong-headed for climate as well as heritage reasons.

She added: ‘This will pour carbon into the atmosphere at the worst possible time, while any offsets will be spread over half a century.

‘In the run-up to Cop 26 and ministerial pledges on net zero targets, it seems extraordinarily short-sighted for the City of London and the Ministry of Justice to promote the bulldozing of reusable and historic building stock in the heart of one of London's most famous and cherished streets.

‘The government is calling on citizens for immediate action on climate change and doing the exact opposite themselves.’

Other critics (see comments below) questioned how a high-profile architect like Parry could put his name to such a project, especially given his practice’s signing of Architects Declare.

One of the Architects Declare pledges is ‘upgrade existing buildings for extended use as a more carbon-efficient alternative to demolition and new build whenever there is a viable choice’.

However, Parry told the AJ that the brief precluded this.

‘Eric Parry Architects undertook an extensive alternative options study to understand how we would deliver the requirements of the client brief on the Salisbury Square site,’ he said.

‘In this study, we examined scenarios with varying degrees of retrofit and new-build. The new justice quarter has a unique set of operating and security requirements, and our study concluded clearly that the only way to deliver the required accommodation on this strategically significant site within the City of London was with the new-build option.

‘This study has been shared with and verified by a wide range of stakeholders and consultees who have supported its conclusions.’

A City of London Corporation spokesperson claimed Oldfield had looked ‘selectively’ at upfront carbon and ‘did not consider the whole picture’.

They said: ‘We are committed to tackling climate change and our ambitious Climate Action Strategy commits us to support the achievement of net zero carbon emissions for the whole Square Mile by 2040.

‘This civic development will be extremely important for London and the UK as a whole and we took great care in thoroughly investigating options for the scheme.

‘There are significant benefits in moving the City of London Police and the Law Courts out of buildings, which no longer meet operational needs, into a bespoke development which reclaims materials from the existing buildings, reduces energy demand through well-insulated facades and includes green roofs and an all-electric heating system.’

The Ministry of Justice – which oversees HMCTS – refused to comment on Oldfield’s figures, saying it was a matter for the City of London as the developer.

But Gummer responded that the department's position was untenable.

‘Like every government department, they are responsible for the emissions that they cause, not only their direct emissions,’ he said.

Comments

Catherine Slessor, architecture critic and president of the Twentieth Century Society

‘It’s not always straightforward to adapt existing structures, but nonetheless, the more they are seen as dispensable by high-profile clients and architects, such as the City of London and Eric Parry, a confirmed signatory of Architects Declare, which commits to strategies of refurbishment over demolition, the less this issue gains political and public traction, undermining efforts to confront the climate emergency.

‘Clearly the dial can and should be moved; it’s a question of reframing priorities and leading by example, qualities that seem to be shamefully absent in this case.’

Rachael Owens, Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN)

‘By now we all know that the retrofit and reuse of existing buildings is one of the best ways to minimise the environmental impact of development. This wilful destruction on an entire city block is both an environmental and heritage nightmare.

‘It is critical that the value of these existing assets is understood and retained, from the historic and cultural value of Chronicle House and 80-81 Fleet Street, to the material and structural value of Fleetbank House - which surely has the additional structural capacity to take alteration and perhaps additional floors.

‘The City of London must first, and urgently, commission a feasibility study into the retention and reuse of all the existing buildings, seeking retrofit solutions to enhance their value and provide spaces fit for purpose.’

Paul Powlesland, barrister at Garden Court Chambers and founder of Lawyers for Nature

‘Much of the legal profession has still not begun to grasp the fact that in the present times, there can be no justice without climate justice.

‘This appears to apply to the City of London’s new Justice Quarter, where, in the middle of a climate emergency, they are choosing to unnecessarily waste thousands of tonnes of carbon building new courts.

‘This is unacceptable in a climate emergency. They should instead look to the perfectly viable alternative schemes that exist to refurbish their existing courts and all the precious embodied carbon they contain.’

Jo Maugham, director of Good Law Project

‘The legal community has a special responsibility to speak honestly about the carbon costs of demolition and reconstruction. If not us, then who? I'd rather we weren’t publicly congratulating ourselves while privately contributing to climate change.’

Susan Pearson, retired architect and City of London councillor

‘Professor Oldfield’s figures are depressing, especially in light of the City Corporation’s own climate action strategy, which aims to achieve net zero carbon emissions from its own operations by 2027 and across its investments and supply chain by 2040. The Justice Quarter project takes no account of this.

‘There is little understanding among members of the corporation’s planning committee about terms and figures relating to carbon emissions that are presented in officers’ reports, and little weight is given by them to the impact of demolition and rebuilding instead of refurbishment and repurposing.

‘In fact, little weight is given to any planning policy that a major office development contravenes. The Justice Quarter contravened several policies, most controversially on heritage.’

Graeme Harrower, City of London councillor

‘Whenever a major developer makes excuses for not reusing existing buildings in the Square Mile, the City Corporation accepts them, while producing a stream of propaganda about its green credentials.

‘Two months after the corporation approved its own Justice Quarter development, it granted permission for the demolition of a substantial office block at 55 Basinghall Street completed less than 30 years ago and its replacement by another larger office block (in which the corporation had a financial interest as the owner of the freehold).

‘The developer’s excuse was that a more modern building would attract tenants in “a flight to quality”. The problem with this argument, apart from the obvious environmental one, is that those fleeing to quality will be leaving behind empty office space when demand for that space is falling.

‘So the City will eventually have a few modern oversized blocks that are fully occupied, and a lot of older ones that are empty. But the corporation’s planning committee doesn’t think that far. Most of its members, who are not clearly accountable due to the City’s unique business vote system, treat its function as being to rubber-stamp any application for a major office development that comes before it, whatever planning policies it contravenes, including environmental ones.’