Apple's Plans for London Financial District Store Caught in Dispute Over Sunlight

[Shrink]

Originally Posted by winston1236

quit an ugly building, one of those that falls out of style after a year and is then hated for decades before being torn down

As mentioned above, the Flat Iron Building in NYC, though not as radical as the building under discussion, is also a wedge shaped building.

It was built in 1902 and is an Historical Landmark in NY. It is definitely not hated nor it has it been torn down, as it is a protected landmark.

See www.wikipedia.com/wiki/flatironbuilding.

[John.B]

Originally Posted by RussUK

You use of the word ignorant was superfluous

And your grammar is atrocious. Your point?

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Originally Posted by Shrink

It was built in 1902 and is an Historical Landmark in NY. It is definitely not hated nor it has it been torn down, as it is a protected landmark.

Not only is the Flatiron not hated, but it's architecture is fairly widely copied across cities in the US. It's a great look for an otherwise perplexing civic design problem.

[cjbryce]

Originally Posted by Boomchukalaka

That is quite a concentration of Apple stores!

It just seems that way. In fact an Apple store in The City (the financial district of London) makes a huge amount of commercial sense:-

Nighttime population (residents) < 10,000 whereas daytime population > 350,000 (commuters) a huge number of whom live outside London and do not have time to get across to Covent Garden at lunchtime or after work.

Besides anything else the Covent Garden and Regent Street stores are normally packed to the gunwales with 14 year old tourists playing with the iPads and iPods and all the staff are occupied explaining Angry Birds to them

[Migsy]

The City does need an Apple store - as the Covent Garden and Regent street stores are *just* too far away to get there and back in a 1 hour lunch break.

It would also be good for my employer, as we have quite a few macs in the office, so having an Apple store local would be very convenient.

[MrCubes]

Originally Posted by cjbryce

It just seems that way. In fact an Apple store in The City (the financial district of London) makes a huge amount of commercial sense:-

Nighttime population (residents) < 10,000 whereas daytime population > 350,000 (commuters) a huge number of whom live outside London and do not have time to get across to Covent Garden at lunchtime or after work.

Besides anything else the Covent Garden and Regent Street stores are normally packed to the gunwales with 14 year old tourists playing with the iPads and iPods and all the staff are occupied explaining Angry Birds to them

I currently work at 150 Cheapside. It takes me 10 minutes to get to the Covent Garden store if I take a Boris Bike.

Taking a tube or bus takes too long.

That said it would certainly be handy to have a store just a couple of minutes walk from the office :-)

It would probably make more sense to have a new store closer to Liverpool Street, though.

[cjbryce]

Originally Posted by MrCubes

It would probably make more sense to have a new store closer to Liverpool Street, though.

Agreed - there must be space available around there. It's the obvious place in The City. They're probably also looking at Canary Wharf (that's about the equivalent of the Wall Street "mirror" in New Jersey for our American readers)

Quite apart from the convenience to consumers/businesses, I suspect there's quite a few quid to be captured from those two locations

[jhmoore143]

Originally Posted by The Great Boony

It may surprise you ignorant yanks, but it's never grey and foggy here....

Maybe get off your couch and visit place that doesn't sell fast food once in a while.

I did live there for three years in the mid 1980's. It was dreary and foggy there, but not all the time. There was a very hot summer full of sunshine in 1984 and there were many days of nice weather, but to say "It's never grey and foggy here. . . ." is not exactly true either.

I can post many pictures taken during that time (1983 - 1986) on visits to Warwick Castle, around the Bedfordshire areas and down into London itself where you can see it overcast and dreary. . . .

[RussUK]

Originally Posted by johnnyturbouk

The Building I was tailing about, is called the Shard of London, due it its appearance resembling a shard of glass... duh!

It's called The Shard, London. NOT the Shard of London.

What do you think, that we still live in the 17th Century?

[aperantos]

Originally Posted by jhmoore143

I did live there for three years in the mid 1980's. It was dreary and foggy there, but not all the time. There was a very hot summer full of sunshine in 1984 and there were many days of nice weather, but to say "It's never grey and foggy here. . . ." is not exactly true either.

You can count on your fingers, usually of just one hand, the number of days of stereotypical thick grey fog you get here in a year.

[John.B]

Originally Posted by The Great Boony

It may surprise you ignorant yanks, but it's never grey and foggy here....

I once bicycled across your great country. If I had to summarize my impressions of your weather in a sentence, I would have to say, "It's green for a reason." I saw far more gray days than sunny, and I was certainly glad to have brought adequate rain gear.

While we're at it, it might surprise you to know most Americans impressions of English weather comes from your own literature or derivative works from your history.

Originally Posted by The Great Boony

Maybe get off your couch and visit place that doesn't sell fast food once in a while.

What an odd statement from an Englishman. There was quite a bit of fast food in London years ago and I'd only imagine it would be more prevalent now. It's not as if England has some revered culinary heritage, like the French. Londoners critiquing fast food seems more than a tad ironic. What's next, critiquing our dentistry and orthodontia?

[illitrate23]

Originally Posted by Migsy

The City does need an Apple store - as the Covent Garden and Regent street stores are *just* too far away to get there and back in a 1 hour lunch break.

It would also be good for my employer, as we have quite a few macs in the office, so having an Apple store local would be very convenient.

i dunno, i used to work in a building next door to Cannon Bridge station and i could get to the Regent St store and back within my lunch hour (that was before the Covent Gdn store existed).
then again, i now work on the road behind Cheapside, so it wouldn't even take me 5 mins to get to this new store and then spend my lunch hour playing Angry Birds on an ipad2

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Originally Posted by macadam212

The City of London AKA the square mile is an interesting place, it has a protected medieval street pattern with one of the highest concentration of tall building within Greater London area. This is a real challenge for developers in the area where the building are getting higher and higher, but the street layout is a winding maze and is anything but straight. So daylight is a real issue.

There's also an old law or charter or something that says that the top of St. Paul's cathedral must retain line-of-sight with 3 or 4 other churches elsewhere in London - which explains the weird shapes of some of the buildings in the area (in particular, see Cannon Bridge House and i'm sure it impacted the shape of the roof of the One New Change shopping centre). Also, am sure the same statute maintains that you can't have any building within a certain radius of St Paul's cathedral higher than it, so none of the buildings of that side of the square mile are high-rise.

[mutantteenager]

Another ugly building, let's hope the objection stands.

[MattInOz]

Originally Posted by whooleytoo

That building is freaky. I'm assuming that's an accurate representation, and not someone who got their perspective all wrong! It looks like a relatively low-profile building, and in keeping with the building heights of the surrounding buildings... but the perspective of that shot could be deliberately misleading.

It seems to be accurate camera perspective.
Normally images of building this big would be corrected to remove the 3 point perspective and make it more like the eyes would "see" it.

The image really isn't doing the developers any favours trying to sell this thing. Amazed Apple is interested given the poor sale pitch.

[MarkHarrisonUK]

Originally Posted by sam2428

Anyone else think its funny that this was on 100 CHEAPside drive?


haha, made me chuckle

As a small point, it's not on "cheapside drive", it's on "cheapside." "Side" is an old English word that means "Street."


In terms of the location, the significance isn't just that 350,000 people commute there to work... but that a huge number of them work in the financial sector, and are therefore

1: Bang on the demographic Apple wants for iPads / Macs
2: Hugely influential in terms of financial services / hedge funds / analysts who report on Apple in the world's second biggest financial market
3: Might finally get Apple in the door into corporate IT departments in the financial sector, which is notoriously Windows-desktop based.

[Steve121178]

Originally Posted by rmwebs

They need to get more stores up all over the UK in the big towns before they focus on more in London that aren't needed. At the moment my closest stores aren't too far, but some people have to travel a long, long way!

For me I have a choice of London stores (a short 15-20 min train ride away) or Brent Cross (should take 20 minutes by car, but due to the entire UK highways agency being incompetent, it takes around 1 hour).

Order online...

[PeckhamBog]

The previous stores on the location have now moved out and scaffolding behind hoardings is going up on the existing structure (prior to demolition?).

Conveniently a City Police camera is opposite the store, though I don't know whether the London stores have much stock shrinkage.

[PeckhamBog]

Originally Posted by ekdor

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_5 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8L1 Safari/6533.18.5)

Apple should wait for the cancelations. Buy the empty plot and just build the ground floor where it would cause much less disruption.

I read the small notice on the hoarding today.

It states the work is to remodel the street level store accommodation and move the office entrance to the front from the side.

My earlier post about the hoardings being for demolition were incorrect.

I'll try to get a pic of the poster next week when I'm back at work.

[PeckhamBog]

Details of the work being undertaken shown on the attached poster pic.

[PeckhamBog]

As you can see from the picture the former structure has now been demolished and removed. There are two diggers [large yellow plant] still on the site. I'm not sure if they've simply levelled it or if excavations have begun. I'm back at work next week so I'll look for an inspection hole in the hoarding.

[MrCubes]

Originally Posted by PeckhamBog

. I'm back at work next week so I'll look for an inspection hole in the hoarding.

... and that was your last entry. Did you ever go back?
I had a look last night and couldn't find an inspection hole. Nor could I find any information posted about what they are doing there.

Does anyone know if there are still plans for an Apple store on this site or not?
Or the result of the Right-To-Light appeal?

[PeckhamBog]

I went back that night (to collect my wife and son from the near by Lord Mayor's Party at Mansion House).

All I gleaned was this notice indicating the closure of Honey Lane until July 2014.

http://forums.macrumors.com/attachme...1&d=1363894356

[MrCubes]

Thanks for the update.

So we still don't know if Apple are planning anything on this site.