At first sight, the three towers under construction in a quarter-mile stretch of London’s Bishopsgate near Liverpool Street station are nothing out of the ordinary. The area has enjoyed a long, uninterrupted construction boom as these sites form part of the Eastern Cluster, the area of the city designated for tall buildings.

Two of the towers, 22 and 100 Bishopsgate, conform to the bog-standard, all-glass, worker-in-suits typology, but the third is for people in dressing gowns. Now marketed as One Bishopsgate Plaza, 150 Bishopsgate packs a 237-bed five-star hotel in the lower half of a 43-storey tower with 160 apartments above. At a stroke, this quadruples the number of residents in the Eastern Cluster – a City of London survey in 2018 revealed that the area housed just 49 apartments.

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