it is the first few days of September 2013 and a new building along the London Skyline has gained a rather lot of attention but for all the wrong reasons it's not for its different than normal skyscraper silhouette or the loss of the 1960s building it replaced but for its unique Quirk its ability to melt things around it news reporters have lined the streets reporting on the building's defect one has even managed to fry an egg just by placing it on the street alongside the tower today we're looking at 20 Fen Church Street nicknamed the walkietalkie
or more humorously the fry scraper but how did such a potentially dangerous building appear on one of the most iconic skylines in the world well watch to the end to find out my name is John and welcome to plainly difficult [Music] so before I start I'm going to have to boast at the fact that I got off my lazy behind and actually made my way up to London and even more so I managed to get up to Central London on a day that was rather similar to when this event actually happened although luckily this time
I didn't get melted by a death ray anyway let's get started background London Skyline is an ever evolving organism due to the space being limited along the central portion of the ancient city it has seen a trend towards taller buildings one part of London is no better described like this than the city of London now London is a strange place when I say city of London I actually mean the city of London a roughly square mile area which follows the ancient borders of the OG London of course the rest of greater London is also the
London l City but I know it's a bit confusing anyway the city of London is one of the biggest Financial Centers of the United Kingdom and over its history has also been the head of the serpent that was once the British Empire but I'm not going to delve too much into the history of the city of London but I do kind of have a history adjacent video which covers some of the area and this is my betham video but for a more detailed history of the era check out one of the many fascinating videos from
Jews guides right so let's laser focus in on 20 fenur Street laser being the rather apt word Our Story begins with the end of the original 20 thenur Street building this was the 1960s glass steel and concrete building penned by William H Rogers and occupied by Investment Banking Company kleinworth Benson the building was pretty typical for a 60s office block back then limitations in building design design and common practices meant that a highrise had to be built on a large lowrise base in which a narrower taller building could be built this makes sense in order
to ensure you have a building with a stable base but as architectural methodology Advanced and construction methods evolved more efficient use of a plot of land could be achieved this coupled with the very expensive nature of land within the square mile meant to by a new more efficient space use building could be envisioned for 20 fenur Street thus the old boxy building was planned for its demolition to be replaced by a taller and wider and some would say more controversial skyscraper a new tower the building was penned by architect Raphael benoli it was to be
160 m tall building spanning 37 floors plus three Sky Garden floors on the top the facade of the tower was a wall of glass over a steel and concrete skeleton interestingly and this would later become part of its detractor biggest criticisms was that the upper floors of the tower had a greater square footage than the lower floors a complete opposite to the building that it replaced this had two benefits it made the tower have a more unique silhouette onics exterior but more vital for the building's owners land Securities group it allowed owed the more traditionally
higher and more expensive floors to be bigger thus potentially increasing rental earnings this would be the Achilles Hill of the building but we'll come back to that later on in the video the building on its southern side had a concave glass facade making the building look as if as I've heard being described has a pint of beer with too much foam in the head more commonly the building was called by locals and the media the walkie-talkie building sooli pinned the building in 2004 and after the usual toing and throwing between planners and developers the final
design was signed off by the city of London in 2007 by 2008 the original building had been demolished and the fittings for the new tower were being driven into the London clay however during its construction the building began its history of racking up controversies as it took shape over the London Skyline many of the neighboring properties complained over the now looming structure one such was the obstruction of light however their complaints would be somewhat quelled when the structures glass outter skin was installed but for probably all the wrong reasons the fry scraper during the summer
of 2013 the building was nearing its completion much of the glass had been installed over the southern face of the tower which had G the name the walkie-talkie building however people started noticing that the street along the east chep Road at certain points of the day during the summer it was unusually bright and hot it is the 29th of August and a Mr Lindsay director of Thailand company madna contracts limited has parked his Jaguar on East chep the walkie-talkie building looms over all seem normal when he locks up his car and leaves for his business
but just 2 hours later upon his return to East cheep he finds a crowd gathered around where his car was parked upon reaching the car as reported in an interview with Lindsay by the BBC a photographer asked me have you seen that car the owner won't be happy parts of the Jaguar had melted painted peeled and one of the wing mirrors had fallen apart from the heat a note was placed on the car's windscreen from the building's contractors asking the owner to call them over the following days local businesses along East cheep noticed burnt floor
mats wilting paintwork on shop fronts and even merchandise I seeing Windows melting something was clearly not right and the developers knew it over the weekend leading into September 2013 a statement was released we are aware of the concerns regarding the light reflecting from 20 fenur Street and we're looking into the matter the city of London suspended parking along three Bays on East Jeep where the temperatures were deemed to be the hottest it wouldn't take long before the city's news agencies caught on to the story that the new addition to the London Skyline was potentially responsible
for becoming London's first death ray soon enough news crews would film the reporters frying eggs along East sheep it was found that temperatures would be at their hottest for roughly 2 hours each day in the summer at close to 90° centigrade unsurprisingly in typical British media fair the building gamed a few new humorous nicknames the fry scraper the walkie-talkie or my personal favorite the death ray the owners of the tower quickly accepted responsibility Mr Lindsay recovered the some 900 quoted for repairs to his car alongside the other shops along East cheep eventually the developers were
set out their plan to temporarily and then permanently fixed the issue initially a temporary screen was erected along East Jeep which would absorb the focus Sunray to permanently sort the issue a non-reflective film was installed over the glass and a brzy suelli I think I pronounced that wrong was placed to absorb the sun basically a type of parasol which ultimately would make the building safe for his neighbors but what many were asking was how was the building built in such a way that it allowed it to be a solar ray gun how so in its
most basic explanation the design of the southern side of 20 Fen Church Street was essentially a giant magnifying glass the South facade was concave and highly reflective now reflective glass on skyscrapers is rather common it helps with cooling the building as it stops the sun's Rays from heating up its interior but when combined with the walkie-talkie shape the reflected sunlight was then focused down to the ground on the southern side of East sheep and it created a kind of parabolic mirror the building's architect said in an interview that the original design had led horizontal windows
on its South facade however these were dropped during the planning stages between 2006 and 2008 as a cost casting measure the original plan would have reduced the focusing effect of the building's concave curvature the hot spots on the ground were known by the building's planners but it was predicted to be only around a not so melty 36° clearly these predictions were wrong as in reality the temperature was estimated to be between 70 and 90° Wen Oli would admit in an interview that the project had its issues he would also put some of the blame on
global warming when I first came to London years ago it wasn't like this now you have all these sunny days so you should blame this thing on global warming too right a rather interesting way to blame things I suppose Fally enough architect Raphael benoli had actually done this before in his Vdara Hotel in last Vegas which had reportedly melted poolside Furniture curved glass was also used here and this must have been a kind of thing for the architect Now by 2014 the building's laser issues were solved but that wasn't the end to the South facad
issues so the same concave shape that caused to focus light could also Focus wind which also made sometimes very annoying wind tunnel effect along East chep and a pedestrian section by the south face of the town now although a rather humorous part of London's history it was actually rather lucky that no one was killed as a problem could have been worse if it wasn't for the generally overcast conditions London had during that summer so that's my story on the fry scraper is going to be a low number on the disaster scale at a one or
a two and this is what I've got for my bingo card do you agree let me know in the comments also whilst you air subscribe and if you enjoyed the video and what I get up to here on my channel maybe also give me a like this is a plain difficult production all videos in the channel Creative Commons attributions sherite licensed PL videos produced by me John in a currently quite dark Southern corner of London UK this is because I'm recording this at 1:00 in the morning anyway I have a second YouTube channel and an
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