Shell Centre - Site History and Layout

Site History and Layout

Shell Centre occupies part of the site cleared for the 1951 Festival of Britain. The areas closer to the River Thames now include Jubilee Gardens and the South Bank Centre. Jubilee Gardens remained undeveloped prior to its laying out as an open space, largely because of a restrictive covenant in favour of Shell that restricts any building on the part of the site directly between the Shell Tower and the River Thames. The naming of the Shell Centre buildings perpetuated the split of the Festival site into distinct Upstream and Downstream areas – separated by the railway viaduct approach to Hungerford Bridge.

During construction, parts of abandoned works for the Waterloo and Whitehall Railway were discovered. This was a prototype for a proposed pneumatic railway that would have run under the River Thames linking Waterloo and Charing Cross. Digging was started in 1865 but was stopped in 1868 due to financial problems. Involved in the proposal was Thomas Webster Rammell, who was also responsible for the Crystal Palace Pneumatic Railway and the London Pneumatic Despatch Company.

Of special interest to those who care to look into the Thames at low tide just in line with the tower or ride in the London Eye, you may notice water turbulence at one point a few feet into the river bed. This is the outflow point of Shell Centre's air-conditioning system, which sucks in river water from just outside County Hall and sends it via a pipe within a bolt iron tunnel (built exactly like a tube railway tunnel), to a point convergent with the outfall, then both the intake pipe and the outflow pipes continue under the embankment and Jubilee Gardens to the basement of the tower. From here the water is sent through filters and then heat exchanges to provide cooled air in the building. The pipes had to be especially supported on adjustable jacks during excavation work for the extension of the Jubilee Line in 1995 because of settlement during the driving of an access tunnel out from Jubilee Gardens to the main running lines in York Road via Chicheley Street.