This year participants were asked to bring along a personal story in the style of the television programme ‘Would I Lie To You?’, where participants tell personal stories and their colleagues have to guess whether or not they are true. Mine was simple: ‘As an architectural student I once climbed a tower crane to retrieve my gloves from the back of the counter-jib. True or false?’

My fellow riders quickly concluded that, since my student years pre-dated today’s health and safety culture, the story was probably true. They were correct.

In 1977, while studying at the Architectural Association, I was designing a mixed-use scheme for a site in London’s Covent Garden. To understand the best views that would be enjoyed from my proposal, I wanted photographs from approximately 20th-storey height.

I asked the manager on an adjacent construction site if I could climb his tower crane. He telephoned his MD who approved my mission with the single instruction: ‘Be bloody careful!’ That was the entirety of the risk assessment and preparation. No induction. No disclaimer forms. No hard hat. Not even site boots.

The workings of a modern tower crane.

After a long climb, Terry the operator welcomed me into his cab before leading me onto the counter-jib itself. With no walkway and no handrails, I shuffled sixteen metres above the city, eventually reaching the basket beyond the counterweights whilst Terry, having returned to his cab, rotated the crane, allowing me to photograph the London skyline in every direction.

It was undoubtedly hazardous, but equally, everyone involved understood the nature of the risk and accepted responsibility accordingly.

Sometime later I was invited to meet the managing director who had authorised my ascent. A Bristol Beaufighter pilot during World War II, he thought that young people benefited from confronting risk rather than being entirely insulated from it. Coming from someone who had flown combat missions in his early twenties, it was a perspective that left a lasting impression.

None of this is an argument against construction safety: our industry’s historical record is far too poor in this respect for nostalgia to become policy. Indeed, the introduction of the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations in 1994 represented an important step forward, improving coordination and responsibility across the life of projects. Few would wish to return to the accident rates that once characterised construction.

Yet there is a distinction between sensible risk management and the attempted elimination of risk at any cost. Sadly, that distinction is becoming increasingly blurred when one looks across the rooftops of our towns and cities. Clearly problems arise when the pursuit of safety ceases to be proportionate and instead reshapes architecture itself.

I say this with particular reference to the permanent, usually crude, handrail systems that are now appearing on an ever-growing number of buildings.

Intended to facilitate maintenance access in compliance with ‘work-at-height’ legislation, such handrails are all too often now being installed with little or no regard for their visual impact. The result is often a clutter that compromises otherwise carefully composed rooflines, damages appearance, and diminishes the character of buildings.

The question is not whether workers should be protected, but whether protection, including that which is retrofitted, should be designed into buildings with the same care as any other element.

Advocates would no doubt argue that such additions substantially reduce risk by providing permanent collective protection. However, this approach can impose additional costs, visual harm, water-penetration and durability problems onto buildings that may only require occasional specialist access. In most cases, alternative safety strategies are entirely feasible. These could comprise temporary systems, mobile access equipment, restraint arrangements, or task-specific risk assessments undertaken by competent contractors.

The issue is not safety itself, but whether safety measures are being selected proportionately.

Amongst the most damaging examples of rooftop safety installations that I have encountered during my recent travels are those on healthcare facilities, motorway service areas, and public buildings. In each case, as shown below, prominent rooftop handrails appear to have been added with little or no consideration for their adverse impact on the design. The resulting interventions lack any discretion, instead reading as afterthoughts to otherwise resolved, albeit modest, architectural compositions.

Medical facility in Hereford.


Cherwell Valley Services on M40.


The Job Centre, High Road, Loughton.

Housing Association flats at New Road, Rainham in East London.

In the above examples, the crude handrailing arrangements deliver a powerful visual impact which is entirely unsympathetic to the remainder of the building. In the Hereford medical facility, the fixing of the uprights differs from one façade to another, reinforcing the impression of an intervention that received little architectural consideration. At Loughton the rhythm of the uprights and corner treatments are inconsistent and the connections are unresolved.

Most striking of all was the installation of handrails on structures marking the entrance to the multi-storey car park at Harlow’s Water Gardens. The intervention fundamentally alters the appearance of two important components of the architectural composition which, in neither case, appear to carry services or equipment requiring routine inspection or maintenance. Frederick Gibberd must have turned in his grave.

Water Gardens car park entrance: Harlow New Town.

Too often, the assumption appears to be that any possibility of future access to roofs should be provided via permanent physical additions to the building. Such thinking may simplify management procedures, but it also represents a fundamental failure to understand architecture as a cultural and visual resource.

Buildings are not merely assets to be maintained. They are designed objects. The means by which they are maintained should therefore be subject to design judgement no less than the buildings themselves. The roofscapes should form part of their architecture and, collectively, part of the public realm.

In my opinion, responsibility for safety during maintenance should rest primarily with those carrying out the work and those planning it, rather than being retrospectively designed into every roof edge. Importantly, the existence of future maintenance obligations should not automatically dictate permanent alterations to architectural character and form. Competent contractors should be well capable of assessing hazards and selecting appropriate means of access. It should not automatically follow that every roof edge requires a permanent guardrail.

Architecture has always involved balancing competing demands: safety, economy, function, durability and beauty. The challenge is not to maximise one objective at the expense of all others, but to achieve an intelligent equilibrium between them.

When viewed from street level, many of today’s rooftop safety interventions suggest that this balance is being lost. In our understandable desire to eliminate every conceivable risk to those who access roofs in the course of building upkeep, we are surely creating a different kind of damage: the gradual degradation of the very buildings we claim to be protecting.