Richard Seifert in the Sixties

Buildings by Richard Seifert and Partners are surprisingly easy to spot. Especially those designed by George Marsh. There's an avoidance of the right angle to an almost obsessive degree, leading to the bizarre faceted shapes of the individual components, be they the jaunty legs, structural panels or the gable ends. Often it's only the obsessive detailing of the micro-mosaic crawling all over the outer shell that holds to the right angle.


This is fascinating footage taken of his buildings by British Pathe in the sixties. It opens with the long departed Drapers Gardens, their fabulous City tower opened in 1967 and demolished just forty years later to make way for a much lower-rise block. The film moves on to various other buldings, including Centre Point, and drawings and footings for the curved corners of his beautiful International Press Centre, completed in 1972, and now scheduled for demolition, joining other lost Seifert towers such as London Brdge House.

It ends up with another great, and early, Marsh and Seifert building, Tolworth Tower (1964). This rocket-shaped wonder is a huge landmark in Tolworth, West London. Thank goodness this seems to be one example of Marsh's work that is a survivor. Along with the NLA Tower in Croydon and Space House in Holborn, it is one of their greatest buildings, and it's great to see such pristine sixties footage capturing it before the fumes from the Kingston bypass got to it.