Paternoster Square - 1980s and 1990s

1980s and 1990s

In the late 1980s, as it became harder to fill leases on the site, there were proposals to redevelop the area. A competition was won in 1987 by Arup associates with a complicated (some said incoherent) postmodern plan. This was abandoned in 1990 in favour of John Simpson's classicising scheme, sponsored by a newspaper competition and championed by the Prince of Wales. Dismissed by supporters of modern architectural styles as pastiche, this plan too was abandoned.

In 1996 a masterplan by William Whitfield was adopted and put into action over the following years. By October 2003 the redeveloped Paternoster square was complete, with buildings by Whitfield's firm and several others. Among the main tenants was the newly relocated London Stock Exchange.

Supporters of the scheme praised it for its harmonious architecture, much of it built in brick and stone like Wren's chapter house for St Paul's (which is integrated into the plan); for its mixture of offices and shops; and for its coherent organization of space by means of a large central piazza and urban walkways that cut through the block in logical ways to tie it into the surrounding urban fabric.

Critics called the architecture banal; dismissed the mixed-use credentials of any development that incorporated no housing (at weekends outside peak tourist season, they claimed, the pedestrian zone would be dead, its shops and restaurants empty); and denied that, consisting as it did mainly of a few large office blocks, it represented a new departure in urban planning.