Sellar moves on London Bridge area

VETERAN property developer Irvine Sellar has stepped up his campaign to change London's skyline with the purchase of a Sixties office block earmarked for redevelopment abutting his proposed 'shard of glass' skyscraper at London Bridge.

Sellar Property Group has teamed up with CLS Holdings to buy New London Bridge House, a 20-storey block just inside the London Bridge station concourse, for £39.5m.

The building is next to Southwark Tower, another Sellar- CLS owned building, which could by 2007 be turned into a needle-shaped glass high-rise, dubbed 'the shard of glass' if a planning inquiry allows the controversial project later this year.

Sellar and CLS hinted at their redevelopment plans for New London Bridge House on Friday.

The building, they said in a joint statement, 'could provide a greater capacity for regeneration of the London Bridge area beyond that currently envisaged by Renzo Piano's 'shard of glass' proposed redevelopment of Southwark Tower'.

New London Bridge House is occupied by five tenants including Standard Chartered Bank, Coutts & Co and Marubeni Europe on leases expiring in 2009. The building currently provides 131,000 square feet of office space.

Any new building on the site, however, could provide up to eight times as much space if the 'shard of glass' plans are anything to go by.

A source close to Sellar said: 'Buying New London Bridge House gives us control over the whole station concourse.'

The building is planned to be more than 1000 feet tall with more than 60 storeys making it Britain's biggest, outstripping Canary Wharf's Canada Tower, and the world's sixth largest.