Food with a view

Architect Tony Fretton’s new riverside restaurant, nestled between Tower Bridge and a Unesco World Heritage Site, offers a dining experience to whet the appetite
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17 October 2012

There’s a new, intriguing spot for dinner in the City and it’s not an easy one to find. Duck down the staircase from the pavement of Tower Bridge Road on the north side of the river and you end up in what feels like part of the car park of the ugly Tower Hotel, looking out on the river. Another brief search and you’ll find an innocuous black-painted steel doorway leading into a stone arch under the bridge’s approach. This unlikely vestibule leads to The Perkin Reveller, a restaurant in a building designed by Tony Fretton Architects.

Fretton’s building leans up against Tower Bridge, on a site just 10 metres from the outer wall of the Tower of London. It’s a location that many architects would feel the pressure of: next to a Unesco World Heritage Site, joined on to one of London’s most recognisable landmarks, with a backdrop of Norman Foster’s City Hall across the river and the new, shiny towers of the City to the north.

The Tower Wharf area, which is run by Historic Royal Palaces, is pretty much only for tourists, and this project (the budget for which is undisclosed) is substantially about generating income for HRP, which receives no government funding.

Many other architects have designed various terrible things around the tower. The Tower Hotel on the east side of Tower Bridge Road regularly tops polls of London’s ugliest buildings. Richard Rogers Partnership’s glass-fronted office block looking across the busy traffic intersection at the north-eastern corner of the tower complex is almost as bad. Even Tower Bridge itself destroys the setting of the tower with its long, sloping run-up. It’s not an auspicious spot for architecture.

Fretton was unfazed by the tricky site. At 65, and with a track record of serious architecture that is somehow straightforwardly open to and connected with its surroundings (the Stirling Prize-nominated Fuglsang Art Museum in Denmark, the British Embassy in Warsaw, Poland, the Lisson Gallery near Edgware Road), he is not here to make an egotistical statement. He has crafted a building that tells us something important about the value of the small scale in a part of London where the large scale is now the norm.

He has also created a civilised place for riverside dining that is not a chain or a tourist trap. Our meal at the Perkin Reveller came to around £65 for two people, and the food (devised by executive chef Andrew Donovan) was modern, British and hearty: mine was a fresh and delicious Cornish fish stew. The service, too, was sunny and cheering. In the summer, it’s going to be a popular place: the ideal spot to take your out-of-town parents for a meal against a backdrop of historic London.

The building is in four parts. A small cocktail bar occupies the arch in the footing of Tower Bridge. You pass through the elaborate Victorian façade to enter into the new-build section: a lower-ceilinged dining area with another bar, connecting to a beautiful, high room with a sloping ceiling punctured by an oculus.

Huge windows surround this lofty space, and through the western façade you access a terrace that must be one of the nicest spots in London to have a riverside drink. The high-ceilinged room is airy and open to the exterior on three sides through huge windows. I dined there on Friday night, and interestingly the tables that were busiest didn’t have the river view but looked out on the wall of the tower: there’s something about dining against the romantic backdrop of medieval masonry that clearly works.

The huge windows don’t make you feel exposed: the restaurant is surrounded on two sides by the white Kentish ragstone of the tower and the Cornish granite foundation of the bridge. And of course the river views are spectacular.

Fretton made the building’s exterior subtly referential. The façade is made of vertical planks of sweet chestnut, sawn not planed, stained a light grey that seems to match the light shades of the tower’s outer walls (built in the 13th century). Also, the building subtly takes its cues from the geometrical arrangement of the bridge and the tower. The slight curve means the building joins to the bridge but kinks in plan so that the largest room is parallel with the walls of the tower. It’s the gesture of an architect who generates his architecture out of observations of the surroundings.

The interior design was not carried out by Fretton’s office, and it is of mixed success. The Perkin Reveller is definitely a “concept” restaurant, with bits of faux medieval heraldry (the restaurant’s title is taken from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales) combined with modern furniture and bits of antique tableware. The bar in the arch of the bridge is too packed full of furniture, and the Gothic bar/counter is a low point. In the main restaurant spaces, the blond wood furniture and refectory tables work well, visually, in a Scandinavian mode.

That said, architect and interior designer must share responsibility for that depressingly ubiquitous fault in new bars and restaurants: the terrible acoustics. A birthday party on the other side of the restaurant while I was there with my wife meant that romantic whispers were fruitless. However, it’s a subtle, simple interior in the main, and a pleasure to spend time in.

Fretton says he wanted to make a building that had its own identity but related to the context. The ticket offices and public spaces around the tower itself were completed in 2004, and were the latest attempt to make something appropriate next to the tower and the tower’s riverside.

“When you look at the buildings on Tower Bridge Wharf,” he says, “they fall into two categories. There are the new ticket offices that try to be high tech and choose to be part of the context of the City’s new office buildings. Then there is the small-scale painted timber architecture along the river that thinks it’s anonymous.” Fretton’s building is neither of these things.

Despite its small size, it sits between the medieval castle of London and a boisterous, vulgar Victorian bridge and relates to both through its urban arrangement and its materials.

The restaurant also reminds us of something the City of London is in the throes of forgetting: that small architecture is just as important as iconic towers when it comes to our enjoyment of urban life.

Fretton’s take on the city is one that I share, that as the city’s skyline erupts we need to be ever more attentive to what happens on ground level.

He says: “We are at a moment of high individualism in architecture: some of the most recent buildings in the City look like they could be anywhere in South-East Asia. I think when you take a city that relies on a certain smallness of scale, and you rip that up with no discussion about what should replace it, you are going to get public disappointment.”

This is a tiny building, with space for 80 diners and a few more in the bar, but it creates a new, intimate moment in one of the most tourist-overwhelmed spots of central London. At night, winding your way down and through the bridge to get to this modern space is a great experience.

The City of London is characterised by such moments, of pubs, restaurants and so on crowding into alleyways and back streets. Modest as it is, this is one of the few recent projects in the City that creates an experience like this, rather than removing one.

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