There was a time, not so very long ago, when the skyline of London was dominated by the work of one architect: not Sir Christopher Wren, but Colonel Richard Seifert. But while Wren is universally admired, Seifert has been reviled. Architects hated his success; the public his uncompromising brutalist aesthetic. Yet now, more than two decades after his death, that appears to be changing.
Seifert – who did a spell in the Royal Engineers during the second world war and then insisted on being addressed by his military rank throughout his life – was often said to have had more of an impact on the capital than anyone bar the creator of St Paul’s. He was responsible for Centre Point in Tottenham Court Road; the NatWest Tower, or Tower 42, in the City (for more than a decade the tallest building in the UK after topping out in 1977); Space House in Kingsway; the Euston Station offices; and the ‘50p building’, No. 1 Croydon. London’s infamous ‘dragon’s teeth’ skyline of scattered towers was largely of his creation.
Other cities such as Birmingham, with his Alpha Tower, and Manchester, with Gateway House, would also come to bear his distinctive mark. He was only narrowly prevented from building the world’s tallest skyscraper in Melbourne, and by the time he retired in the mid-1980s he had completed 500 office blocks all over the UK. His distinctive monoliths were equally unrelenting in height and their pared-back brutalist aesthetic – ‘brutalism’ being derived from béton brut, or ‘raw concrete’.
Perhaps it was inevitable that over the decades he would become a lightning rod for opponents of the rapacious development that began in the late 1950s: with his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, later containing one of the first carphones in the country, his Savile Row suits and his ability to circumvent planning laws (usually by having a more detailed grasp of them than the planners themselves), Seifert had the air of a stereotypical plutocrat. Having been born Reuben, rather than Richard, to a Swiss-Jewish family 114 years ago this week, there was more than a hint of anti-Semitism in the criticism. But when the 34-storey Centre Point, completed in 1966 against a largely low-lying backdrop, was deliberately left vacant for nine years by the developer Harry Hyams as rents soared, fury mounted about land speculation – and Seifert became notorious. The public criticised him for aesthetic insensitivity, and even Princess Margaret expressed her disdain when the Royal Garden Hotel was plonked at the bottom of her patch in Kensington. Not that he much cared: his only criterion was that ‘people get a building that is worth the money they paid for it’.
But tastes change, and reputations heal. Today Centre Point is Grade II listed, and brutalism is celebrated on tote bags and T-shirts. There’s no question that Seifert was nakedly commercial – his clients came first and rewarded him richly – nor that he deserved his uncompromising reputation. Even entering his eighth decade, he would work from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., six days a week, and his recipe for success – ‘You work, you work hard, and you work all the time’ – would have him condemned as a monster in any architectural office today. But there is a dawning realisation that many of his designs, often produced in collaboration with his right-hand man George Marsh, are worthy of another look.
‘It’s a generational thing,’ Oli Marshall, of the Twentieth Century Society, says. ‘A bit like with the Victorian buildings before him – they weren’t valued by the generation that followed and it’s only with the passage of time that we can see how good they are. Now there’s unending interest in brutalism and people are realising that Seifert, who was viewed with suspicion, actually put an enormous amount of care into his designs: all his buildings have enormous personality and really good bones.’
His recipe for success – ‘You work, you work hard, and you work all the time’ – would have him condemned as a monster in any architectural office today
It’s the bones – the quality of the supporting structure – that are now allowing several prominent Seifert buildings to be given a second lease of life. Centre Point has just been converted into 82 apartments by Conran and Partners, while Space House (which was granted Grade II listing in 2015, partly in recognition of its ‘assertive styling’) has been refurbished and turned into premium office space; the former home of the Civil Aviation Authority reopened last month after its £110 million facelift. With its marble aggregate floors, timber panelling and ribbed concrete, it’s like stepping into a time capsule. And it seems that sort of 1960s chic is definitively cool again: the couturier Roksanda held its spring/summer 2025 show there during September’s London Fashion Week.
‘There’s a lot of mastery in his work,’ says Tim Gledstone of Squire and Partners, who oversaw the redevelopment, adding two floors to the top in the process and improving the energy efficiency. ‘Space House itself is an engineering triumph: we were surprised to find that a lot of the concrete structure is about a third as thick as we’d recommend now, and of course it’s mostly on the outside: it’s an astonishing design for 1963, and so expressive. Now that it’s finished, it should be good for another 80 to 100 years.’
That, of course, is also good for the environment: all that concrete has lots of carbon locked up in it, and reusing the building rather than replacing it stops more being used (cement manufacturing accounts for 8 per cent of global CO2 emissions alone). As such it offers a template for those other buildings from the period that haven’t yet been destroyed.
‘Space House was worth saving for its perkily futuristic architecture,’ says Barnabas Calder, an architectural historian at the University of Liverpool. ‘But the default position needs to be that we reuse buildings rather than replace them, even if they don’t have this charm.’
The third Seifert building of the trilogy, and the one that has probably come closest to the wrecking ball, is The Acre in Covent Garden, a grid of blocks up to 11 storeys high constructed in the early 1980s as a bank headquarters. Destruction was considered, but a refit by Gensler now under way will instead save 4,250 tons of CO2. Again, the Colonel’s secret recipe has proven to be his clever use of concrete: where once it merely endured, now it adds character.
‘I think he was brilliant,’ the project’s principal architect Valeria Segovia says of Seifert, who died in 2001 at the age of 90. ‘I understand why he was disliked at the time – architecture and business don’t go well together, and there’s always suspicion about anything commercial here. He also embraced a material like concrete in a country where traditionally buildings were always about brick and stone. And the scale of his buildings was huge, and that can mean shock, but that’s also what appeals to fresh audiences. The thing is that these are really good buildings: they’re designed with rigour, really well engineered, really robust. They were built to last.
‘So I really admire his use of concrete: there’s so much craft and what he achieves with simple materials, with a strong contrast between the shapes and how life moves, is magical. People with an eye for design are starting to appreciate him. It’s about time.’
Given he cared little for public or press, perhaps the irony that he is suddenly becoming the doyen of mid-20th century British architecture would not be lost on Seifert, who clearly had more of a sense of humour than his prim exterior might have led contemporaries to believe. One story has him bursting into laughter when he was told he’d been featured in Private Eye, because the bad publicity was worth far more than good and would only endear him to the money men who put commissions his way.
So for his work now to be re-evaluated, to be praised by the architects whose predecessors hated him, for it to outlive his critics and rivals… well, perhaps he’s had the last laugh. We’ll just have to wait and see, but time is clearly on the side of those who build cleverly in concrete.
