“We have laboured long to build a heaven, only to find it populated with horrors”*…
The view of London’s skyline from the dome of St. Peter’s today (below) and visualized to reflect the completion of all currently-approved skyscrapers (above)
436 new skyscrapers could be popping up in London soon: 114 are at the pre-planning stage, 233 have received approval prior to construction, and 89 are actually being built. A new set of extremely-detailed renderings from Visualhouse and Dan Lowe offer an idea of how this high-rise future might actually look. More (and larger) photos and more background at “A Striking Visualization of London’s Future Skyline.”
* Alan Moore, Watchmen
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As we reach for the sky, we might recall that it was on this date in 1975 that a bill headlined by Kevin Coyne and Procol Harum played the “Closing Show” at London’s Rainbow Theater. Built in 1930 as a cinema, it became a major concert venue in the 1960s: The Rainbow was where Jimi Hendrix first burned a guitar, and where The Beach Boys, Pink Floyd, Queen, Genesis, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Little Feat, Kool & the Gang, the Ramones, and many others recorded live material for albums, television, and film.
The Rainbow was used again, sporadically, for concerts beginning in 1977. But it was subject to a Historic Preservation Order, the maintenance standards of which the owners couldn’t meet; their plans to convert the space into a bingo parlor fell through, and the venue went dark in 1982. It stayed vacant until the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, a Brazilian Pentecostal order, converted into the church that it is today.
