Oxo Tower Wharf by Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands

Oxo Tower Wharf in London was presented at the AT Awards live finals on 18 September 2024. Learn about how the project has stood the test of time.

Completed
1996

Located on London’s South Bank, the Oxo Tower started life as a power station, before being rebuilt in the Art Deco style in the late 1920s when the iconic tower was added. Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands’ ambitious remodelling of the building in the 1990s, saved it from dereliction, and comprises independent shops and exhibition spaces at ground level, designer-maker studios on the first and second floors, 78 affordable apartments on the upper floors, and a restaurant and brasserie on the top floor.

Key design moves include repairing the building’s innovative Truscon concrete, stabilising the structure by inserting three vertical cores, carefully repairing the retained riverside façade with bespoke bricks to match the existing masonry, and adding new elevations to the sides and rear.

Inside, the designer-maker studios incorporate fume cupboards and sprinklers to allow most craft processes to take place. Residential areas employ timber (rather than aluminium) double-glazed windows and balcony doors, with central mechanical extract ventilation to the kitchens, bathrooms and common parts. All habitable rooms are located around the building perimeter to maximise views, natural ventilation and daylight. Heating is by electric night storage with convector boost control – an approach designed to utilise the building’s thermal mass.

Judges comments:
“Ripping up the rule book, Oxo Tower Wharf challenged every preconception about what it was possible to deliver on the south side of the Thames back in the 1980s. The passion that drove this project was still very much in evidence in the presentation by co-protagonists Alex Lifschutz and Iain Tuckett at the Architecture Today Awards live finals. A true game-changer that epitomises enduring success.”

Alex Lifschutz from Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands and Iain Tuckett from Coin Street Community Builders explain how Oxo Tower Wharf redefined London’s South Bank as a desirable place to socialise, live and work.

Iain Tuckett My involvement started in the 1970s, when the local residents mounted a campaign to have housing built on the South Bank. This was a complete change to existing planning policy, which was not to have any residential on the South Bank, but for it to make way for an expansion of the city and the West End. In the early 1970s the concept of public participation had been introduced, and we made use of that to argue that at least some housing should be built.

Alex Lifschutz The project was initiated in the mid-to-late eighties and completed in the mid-nineties. The first phase opened in 1994, so the project is 30 years old. When we first started working on the scheme, London’s population was around six and a half million. Today it’s just under ten. So in three decades it’s grown by the population of Paris or Madrid.

Iain Tuckett Generally the terms used to describe the South Bank were alien, concrete, windswept, bleak. People who came to work in the new County Hall and other developments scurried in from the station, ate at the work canteen, and scurried back at night. None of this new wealth was being spent in the area. Also, the residential population on the whole was very old. So that’s the context for the campaign and the demand that we had for housing and green space in the area.

Alex Lifschutz The Oxo Tower Wharf site was originally developed in the late 19th/early 20th century as a power station to supply electricity to the Post Office. In the late 1920s it was bought by the Vestey Family, who imported meat from Argentina. The building was extended, and a concrete frame put in. The tower was added between 1928 and 1930 as an advertising symbol. There was, and I think still is, a prohibition against advertising on the Thames, and the company’s workaround was to insert windows that were shaped as O.X.O.

Iain Tuckett We found some sympathetic architects at County Hall, and indeed some sympathetic planners, who helped us devise a vision and eventually a scheme led by a GLC team, which was led by Max Nasatyr. That was a great piece of outline planning because it replaced old warehousing with housing but largely kept the street pattern of the area and enhanced it with wonderful green spaces and walks along the river In 1984, we bought the whole Coin Street site from the GLC, which was in the process of being demolished. We cleared the land, completed the Southbank Riverside walkway, made this wonderful little park called Bernie Sands and built the first social housing cooperative development. We also completed Gabriel’s Wharf Market, a cheap interim development of garage units with shop fronts where we explored some of the uses we had in mind for Oxo.

Alex Lifschutz The plan was for a very flexible building that could support multiple uses and could adapt as things changed over time. We inserted east and west circulation cores and a big central core, which stabilised the building but also provided segregated fire escape and access for different users so that everyone is safe and has their own way of getting up and down the building.

Iain Tuckett Initially Max Nasatyr didn’t believe we could get the sort of uses we were looking at within Oxo, or as it was then called, Stamford Wharf. But he visited Boston and saw some of the work they’d been doing refurbishing and renewing warehouses. In 1981 he said, “Do you know, I think we can do it.” That’s when the scheme became a possibility.

Alex Lifschutz Coin Street had set a rather extraordinary brief with an amazing set of different uses. Independent shops at ground level, then two stories of affordable designer/maker workshops. The idea was that people would actually work, making art and craft, and selling it, and that the public would be able to watch them doing it. The idea was very much that if it worked at Gabriel’s Wharf, which it had, it could work at Oxo, as a counterpoint to the notion that the only kind of work you could have in the city is offices. So this was much more active and lively, and had a significant cultural impact. And then the next five storeys were 78 co-op apartments, either side of a four-metre-wide corridor, which is used very much as a social area.

Iain Tuckett Originally, we kept the families with young children on the bottom two floors, but it wasn’t long before there were families on all floors. You’d walk along those corridors and you’d find all the toys and games out. They became a sort of indoor play area. The co-op owns a lease on their residential part of the building, and they are responsible for setting rents and allocating the homes to persons in need. They look after all the internal parts, and they elect a committee to run their affairs. It’s one member, one vote. It’s not always wonderful. Like any other group of people they can fall out. And one of the things they sometimes fall out about is the allocation of homes. The south gets the sun, but people prefer to overlook the river.

Alex Lifschutz The top floor is the restaurant, which was taken by Harvey Nichols, with a brasserie on the west side, and fine dining on the east. The building is at an apex in the river, which means if you’re in the brasserie and you’re looking left and forward you’ll see the Palace of Westminster. And if you’re on the other side and looking right and forward, you’ll see the City. Coin Street was one of the first developers to provide a place where people could come, not necessarily to buy food or drink, but just to enjoy the view from the observation deck.

Iain Tuckett When I first came up to London, people thought of the Thames as a straight line with London proper to the north, and everything that had been banned – prisons, prostitutes, even theatres – to the south. At that time it was quite difficult to get cabs to take you down further south than Waterloo. But what Oxo and the Coin Street site benefit from, is that if you want to go from the City to the West End, the quickest way is to cross over the bridge and walk along the South Bank. So when Oxo was built it became a meeting place for people from those different parts of London. I had a board who were passionate about the river, and one of the things they refused to do was to build out over the beach, which is why there is significant amount of beach at low tide. One of the principles was that we’d open up the river to the public.

Alex Lifschutz Up until that point people had thought of the river as something to throw stuff into, as opposed to something to be appreciated.

Iain Tuckett When we completed the Riverside walkway in 1988, nobody used it. So one of the key things we had to do was to create activity in this area, which had been derelict for more than 30 years. We held summer festivals based on a London community. It could be Greek, Cuban, South African. The local community radio would promote it. The whole place would be absolutely crowded out by that community. That very much put Coin Street on the map. In 1997 we started a River Thames Festival with the wire walk, that’s still going to this day.

Alex Lifschutz Iain’s whole approach is that it’s not a building on its own; it’s a building that’s embedded in a social, cultural and commercial network of experiments and different kinds of uses that can coexist. It’s the difference between seeing the city as a set of separate spaces, each with its own function, and a set of overlapping spaces which change and flex all the time. So if it is a success, and if it continues to be a success, it’s because of that thinking about buildings and places in cities constantly evolving, constantly changing.