Text of a pamphlet distributed free at Bank and St Pauls's Underground stations, May 2001. Since the publication of this pamphlet, John Prescott (previously Environment Secretary under the Labour first term) has called a public enquiry on the Heron Tower.
Update November 2002: The Heron Tower is going up. Score one for Le Corporation.
Update June 2005: Still no sign of the Heron Tower. Score one for human inefficiency. Perhaps it worked?
Update June 2010: The Heron Tower is nearly complete, and I work beneath its shadow.
Organised religion, supposedly the opiate of the masses, has throughout history put its mark on Ludgate Hill - one of the two hills on which London was founded. The Romans built a temple to Apollo there, while a Christian church has stood on the site since at least the 6th century of the current era; the current cathedral of St Paul having been rebuilt by Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of 1666.
'How can one think freely in the shadow of a steeple?'
The cry of the Situationist philosophers of the 1960s is a cliche now - we are past this. The skyline is an aesthetic - a visual playground for our imaginations. And now Ludgate Hill, the high point of our skyline and our imaginations, is threatened by the encroachment of a new religion: commerce - more of an opiate than the old German's petty spiritualism.
The Corporation of London wholeheartedly supports the construction of the Heron Tower, a 43-storey office building in Bishopsgate, marring the city's skyline. This is in direct opposition to the clearly-stated views of English Heritage, the Dean of St Paul's, Westminster City Council, former Environment Secretary John Gummer and ordinary Londoners; and even the dictates of their own planning laws. The City of London currently has a self-imposed limit of 100 metres on new buildings in the Square Mile - one which it has already broken for the construction of the Death Star aesthetic of the NatWest tower. The Dean of St Paul's, in a recent letter to The Times, refuted the Corporation of London's assertions that the Eastern City needed a building to rival the financial settings of New York and the Pacific Rim - one of only many planned to transform London's empathetic skyline. "There is no reason whatsoever," he wrote, "to believe that a far-reaching change in the historic skyline is required to sustain London's position and image as a world city. Nor does anyone seriously believe that this will be the last application to challenge some of the planning judgments that have been made. The historic view of London, which has delighted generations who have stood on Waterloo Bridge, should not be eroded because of any mindset which requires that London simply look like any other city in the world."
This attitude is only to be expected from those whose avowed goal is to increase private wealth while slowly abstracting themselves from ground level. For the avowed imaginist, ground level is the natural space, location of the omphalos, and abstraction from it leads directly to skewed perspectives, delusional complexes and gradual detachment from the realm of everyday life. If you are in any doubt about this phenomenon, witness the soul-destroying devastation wreaked in Docklands by the influence of Thatcher's obelisk. The Corporation has already instituted a policy of misalignment, attempting to realign the city to its own ends. The Temple of Mithras on Walbrook subjugated, parcelled up and shifted to a more convenient site. London Stone, the key to Druid rites and Roman roads, abandoned in the wall of a Japanese bank on Cannon Street. King Lud, mythical founder of the city, languishes in a church doorway on Fleet Street, outside his manor. Their power - the power of myth, of imagination - neutralised by the emergent authorities.
The hijacking of the imagination is the corporations' greatest weapon.
More menacingly still, the Heron has its own associations. As the emblem of the lost continent of Atlantis, the Heron speaks to us as an emissary of death, and this trope is echoed in every one of man's mythologies. In Celtic lore, the Heron is one of the manifestation of Pwyll, King of the Underworld, and in ancient Gaul it represented Mars, the God of War. A Heron is a bad omen, heralding parsimony and evil. The Mosaic Law of the Israelites declared Herons unclean birds; their Hebrew name, anaphah, meaning to breath or huff as if in anger. This symbolism transliterated into Christian modernisations of the pagan myths, and St Thomas Aquinas used them as emanations of those whose "feet are swift to shed blood." Now we see the carnivorous Heron swooping down to snatch the vessica piscis from St Paul's.
The black-winged bird come to devour London.
In ancient Egypt, Heron is equivalent to Phoenix, the sun-bird whose death and fiery rebirth speaks of immortality, resurrection, life after death. The sarcophagi in the British Museum are plastered with Heron glyphs. In a modern cosmology, what could be more damning than marking your skyscraping monstrosity with that - the accusation that the forces of finance are planning a colossal coffin in Bishopsgate to send old London Town to hell. Herons are particularly prominent on the coffins of the priests of Amun - men who claimed to have conquered death and were advancing robed in splendour on the afterlife. Such bombast and arrogance has clear echoes in the modern dynastic corporations supposed immortality of fortune - FTSE souls are burning.
The current Environment Secretary, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, has repeatedly refused to intervene and have the matter decided by the public at an inquiry. What is at stake is nothing less than London itself - its soul and its imagination. The decisions taken now will affect London forever. The simple choice: Preserve and continuously enact the history and future of all our lives in a place in which we feel physically and psychically at home, or bow to the pressures of the corporations and deface the vast countenance of London.
Stop the Heron Tower. Call These Numbers:
Corporation of London: 0207 606 3030
Dept of the Environment: 0208 366 6565
An IGNUCULT publication >> For Immediate Release >> IGNUCULT@army.net