The building stands on the former site of the Baltic Exchange, the headquarters of a global marketplace for ship sales and shipping information. On 10 April 1992 the Provisional IRA detonated a bomb close to the Exchange, causing extensive damage to the historic building and neighbouring structures. The United Kingdom government’s statutory adviser on the historic environment, English Heritage, and the City of London’s governing body, the City of London Corporation, were keen that any redevelopment must restore the building’s old façade onto St Mary Axe. The Exchange Hall was a celebrated fixture of the ship trading company. After English Heritage later discovered the damage was far more severe than first thought they stopped insisting on full restoration, albeit over the objections of the architectural conservationists who favoured reconstruction. The Baltic Exchange sold the land to Trafalgar House in 1995. Most of the remaining structures on the site were then carefully dismantled, the interior of Exchange Hall and the façade were preserved, hoping for a reconstruction of the building in the future. The architectural salvage, its eventual sale for £800,000 and move to Tallinn, Estonia, awaiting reconstruction as the centrepiece of the city’s commercial sector, can be seen in the Baltic Exchange listing. In 1996, Trafalgar House submitted plans for the Millennium Tower, a 386-metre (1,266 ft) building with more than 140,000 m2 (1,500,000 sq ft) of office space, apartments, shops, restaurants and gardens. This plan was dropped after objections for being totally out-of-scale with the City of London and anticipated disruption to flight paths for both London City and London Heathrow airports; the revised plan for a lower tower was accepted.
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The tower’s topmost panoramic dome, known as the “lens”, recalls the iconic glass dome that covered part of the ground floor of the Baltic Exchange. The Gherkin name was applied to the current building at least as far back as 1999, referring to that plan’s highly unorthodox layout and appearance. On 23 August 2000, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott granted planning permission to construct a building much larger than the old Exchange on the site. The site was special because it needed development, was not on any of the “sight lines” (planning guidance requires that new buildings do not obstruct or detract from the view of St Paul’s dome when viewed from a number of locations around London), and it had housed
gherkin the Baltic Exchange. The plan for the site was to reconstruct the Baltic Exchange. GMW Architects proposed a new rectangular building surrounding a restored exchange—the square shape would have the type of large floor plan that banks liked. Eventually, the planners realised that the exchange was not recoverable, forcing them to relax their building constraints.
The task of designing a replacement structure was officially assigned to Sir Christopher Wren on 30 July 1669. He had previously been put in charge of the rebuilding of churches to replace those lost in the Great Fire. More than fifty City churches are attributable to Wren. Concurrent with designing St Paul’s, Wren was engaged in the production of his five Tracts on Architecture.
Wren had begun advising on the repair of the Old St Paul’s in 1661, five years before the Great Fire of London in 1666. The proposed work included renovations to both interior and exterior that would complement the Classical facade designed by Inigo Jones in 1630. Wren planned to replace the dilapidated tower with a dome, using the existent structure as a scaffold. He produced a drawing of the proposed dome, showing that it was at this stage at which he conceived the idea that it should span both nave and aisles at the crossing. After the fire, It was at first thought possible to retain a substantial part of the old cathedral, but ultimately the entire structure was demolished in the early 1670s to start afresh. In July 1668 Dean William Sancroft wrote to Christopher Wren that he was charged by the Archbishop of Canterbury, in agreement with the Bishops of London and Oxford, to design a new cathedral that was “handsome and noble to all the ends of it and to the reputation of the City and the nation”. The design process took several years, but a design was finally settled and attached to a royal
warrant, with the proviso that Wren was permitted to make any further changes that he deemed necessary. The result was the present St Paul’s Cathedral, still the second largest church in Britain and with a dome proclaimed as the finest in the world. The building was financed by a tax on coal, and was completed within its architect’s lifetime, and with many of the major contractors employed for the duration. The “topping out” of the cathedral (when the final stone was placed on the lantern) took place on 26 October 1708, performed by Wren’s son Christopher Jr and the son of one of the masons. The cathedral was declared officially complete by Parliament on 25 December 1711 (Christmas Day). In fact, construction was to continue for several years after that, with the statues on the roof only being added in the 1720s. In 1716 the total costs amounted to £1,095,556 (£143 million in 2014).
On 2 December 1697, only 32 years and 3 months after the Great Fire destroyed Old St Paul’s, the new cathedral was consecrated for use. The Right Reverend Henry Compton, Bishop of London, preached the sermon. It was based
on the text of Psalm 122, “I was glad when they said unto me: Let us go into the house of the Lord.” The first regular service was held on the following Sunday. Opinions of Wren’s cathedral differed, with some loving it: Without, within, below, above, the eye / Is filled with unrestrained delight, while others hated it: ...There was an air of Popery about the gilded capitals, the heavy arches...They were unfamiliar, un-English... The cathedral survived during the Blitz — it was struck by bombs on 10 October 1940 and 17 April 1941. The first strike destroyed the high altar, while the second strike on the north transept left a significant hole in the floor above the crypt. The latter bomb is believed to have detonated in the upper interior above the north transept and the force was sufficient to shift the entire dome by a small amount.
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