Selling change in the City

My journey to work usually takes me through the City of London and I never cease to be surprised how much construction work is going on there. I've written previously about the demolition of a pleasant building to make way for the Shard, which is as immensely disappointing as it is immense. Across the river the pace of change seems to be unrelenting.

Construction has started on the Cheese Grater and (after a long hiatus) the Walkie-Talkie, or 122 Leadenhall Street and 20 Fenchurch Street as they are formally known. Slightly further along the bus route, 110 Cannon Street is now shrouded and being stripped back to a skeleton in preparation for a refit. The hoardings hint at an aspirational approach to selling space in the renovated building: it has words such as bright, individual, refined and stylish arrayed in a chirpy font as though the product being sold were a symphony or a biography, not one of a cluster of mid-height office blocks sandwiched between two of the City's main thoroughfares.

A hundred yards further along Cannon Street is perhaps the most remarkable sight in the City at the moment: a vast empty plot which used to be the 1950s-built Bucklersbury House. All that's left of the unmourned behemoth (and a pleasant Art Deco building on the corner) is a two-storey outcrop being used as a site office while the cranes, bulldozers and concrete-crunchers do their thing. Somewhere in there is also the remains of the ancient Temple of Mithras, which was harshly treated in the post-war rush to development but will now apparently be given a more honoured place when a new building rises from the dust. The landowners Legal & General have struggled to find a suitable scheme for what is a large, unusually shaped and prominent location; and it still isn't clear exactly what they intend to build or when.

Is another office building really needed? Directly across the road is the imaginatively named Walbrook, a low-rise development with glass and steel bulges but precisely zero tenants a full year after its completion. Another elaborate reconstruction of a new block behind an old facade just 100 yards away in Queen Street also appears to be still largely empty after probably three years. Cannon Street station itself has been a building site for years, thanks to the replacement of an unloved 40-year-old office block above the platforms with a building that has elaborate steel cross-braces but is probably only 40 years away from being an unloved 40-year-old office block. It's impressive at street level and the concourse is immeasurably improved, but will the building have any tenants?

The trouble is, of course, that developers start projects during times of boom, when borrowing is easy and firms take on new staff and seek opportunities to upgrade to more imposing and sparklier headquarters. By the time the planning process and construction are finished the economic cycle has reached the bust phase, companies are reducing their headcount and austerity takes precedence over making a statement. Result: empty edifices.

Shouldn't we be worried? These are the companies that collectively manage most of our money. But they can't even plan major construction projects to deliver at the time they're needed. My conclusion is that this betrays an unspoken truth about our modern economy: its foundation is not delivering what people need, but convincing them that change is better than the status quo and the new is best.