London’s architectural geography

London's architectural geography

There is an engaging beginning to John Summerson’s Georgian London in which this historian imagines that he takes us high above the Thames valley, looking down upon the metropolis as an historical unfolding from twin historic foci: the distinct patterning of an artefactual growth that engulfs the landscape described as “the product of a collective, unconscious will”. Suddenly, from this ‘air view’within an accelerated and historically characterised time-frame, one apprehends the basis of London’s contemporary architectural geography. There is pattern. It has coherence. And even as a generalisation, it makes sense.

Summerson’s introductory remarks have always struck me as one of the more important aspects of his book. London was no longer an amorphous conglomeration spreading across the landscape, lost to its own history and to comprehension. Instead, one could read into it a patterning which — whether it was essentially true of not — helped one to understand what was going on, how the new intruded upon the old, what existed accommodated itself to change, and how that aged fabric once enjoyed layered horizons of relevance, one upon the other and all of it awaiting disentanglement on one’s own terms.

London's architectural geography

This patterning is, in essence quite simple. There are two principal poles underlying London’s urban character: the first is one of mercantile affluence and power: the historic City of London, as founded by the Romans on the banks of what was then a much wider and slow-flowing River Thames. The other pole is that of the monarch, the government and church power: Westminster, where we find Westminster Abbey, the Palace of Westminster (the Houses of Parliament), many government buildings — including those of Britain’s principal ministers — and various royal palaces.

For centuries the City functioned as if it were a wealthy state within a state and aspects of that independence exist to this date. But as a city in its own right it has, curiously, always turned its back on the river that was, until comparatively recently, its source of wealth and the life-blood of the metropolis as a whole. It’s heart is at Bank, a confluence of streets, a place where we find the Bank of England and — a building that was once equally important — the Royal Exchange. In essence, the City is about the deals behind the trade rather than that trading itself. This turning away is represented today by Upper and Lower Thames Streets, which cuts off the buildings along the river edge from the heartland of what is now the global focus of complex financial trading.

Left: Liverpool Street Station, at Broadgate — a station which, like much of the City, mixes old and new within the framework of an entirely contemporary keynote. The roof is partly old and partly new looking as if it were old; the decks and shops celebrate their contemporaneity, whilst what sometimes appears to be an historic building has either been entirely rebuilt (in which case, is it old or new?) or disguises its steel and concrete modernity. Such an architectural equation is complex and hardly pure, but it works. London as a whole is rather like that.

Westminster, on the other hand, has always enjoyed a different kind of trading: in Machiavellian gamesmanship between monarchs, the aristocracy, and the church. And what linked these two centres was the tidal River Thames. In the east — up to the blockage formed by London Bridge — it provided a complex of shipping and warehousing facilities together with all kinds of ancillary undertakings that spread along the river banks. On the western side of London Bridge, the Thames was the source of (once) fresh water and fish, and also an easy means of transportation. And along the northern banks from the City to Westminster were many grand houses and places. All around — outside of comparatively weak defences — one has to imagine something like a dense area of suburban market gardening made possible by England’s sea power.

And it was a strange place. Foreign visitors would remark, for example, upon the proclivity of London inhabitants for living ‘vertically’ — as if birds in a cage — in narrow, terraced house types that sported chimneys serving coal fires that polluted the City. And it was this house type that was to be formally regularised in the first building regulations that were introduced in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries to lend some control over the growth and expansion of what was, in effect, a boom town at the heart of a global trading empire that was to be proudly shown to later Victorian school children as a map of the world largely coloured red.

From its historic core — the City — London spread in two directions. First, to the east — as docks, warehouses, secondary industries and the residential areas these supported. And since the prevailing wind comes from the south-west, this area naturally became a second-best part of the City’s urban fabric. Meanwhile, the wealthier inhabitants increasingly moved west — toward Westminster and in the direction of fresh air, water, and culture. In

architectural terms, the latter was represented by a new fashion for ‘regularity’ underpinned’ by the speculative development of aristocratic estates populating the ‘West End’. That regularity can still be seen all over central London in the form of ‘Georgian’ terraces and squares — developments whose mix of ‘landmark’ houses for the wealthy set among less affluent neighbours, mews for horses and servants, churches and even markets form the basis of a pattern of development that continues to this day. When Summerson writes about late seventeenth speculators such as Doctor Nicholas Barbon, we recognise many a contemporary developer and familiar issues of building standards.

This fundamental pattern of westward development — one that continued after World War II, toward the latter day port of Heathrow — was overlaid by new ones fostered by nineteenth century railways and twentieth century cars, but it remains utterly discernible, especially since some eighty percent of the City’s best architecture remains within the boundaries of the Circle Line. The trains charged in as far as they could penetrate, carving their way though the existing fabic, reinforcing new boundaries (e. g. along Marylebone and Euston Roads, from Kings Cross to Paddington). And, more latterly, the M25 ring road (running through the ‘green belt’ around central London) has provided a circumferential pattern of movement to complement a centrifugal one.

But the most significant change of the last 35 years — one that still continues — has been the attempt to alter this dynamic and shift London’s focus

London's architectural geography

Above: Late Tudor and Early Stuart London, when the population was between 350- 400,000. Notice how the basic two-pole pattern is very evident, with development stretching east along the river and around Southwark Cathedral. The Thames at this time was wide and slow flowing, with marshy areas all around Westminster and Lambeth. By 1800 London had a population of over one million and was the largest city in the world — a city whose inhabitants were dominated by the young in their 20’s and by women (54%). Currently, London is again growing and is expected to add another 700,00 people to its current population of @7.5m in the next ten years.

eastward, redeveloping the former areas of the docklands and its associated industrial zones. Inevitably, much of the content of this guide to contemporary architecture is in the east of London. This edition also witnesses a shift toward residential architecture, with the UK now building apartments rather than houses, and trying to do so densely and on inner-city sites rather than suburban ones. This is a massive change especially since, post the early ‘90’s recession, Londoners discovered a new taste for modernism in residential design in lieu of the quaintness they formerly preferred. Unfortunately, the government still emphasises speculative development and private capital, resulting in homes for singles rather than mixed communities which include families, new schools, shops, etc. (A familiar criticism of suburban and 1960’s developments.) Other ironies include a lack of infrastructural investment and the fact that many of these eastern areas are more liable to the dangers of flooding, as well as subject to a development prejudice that still favours the west rather than the east. Current optimism with regard to such issues appears to ride on the back of the 2012 Olympics. Time will tell.

Peter Ackroyd has famously characterised the dynamics of London’s development as if it possessed an organicity, as if London was a living beast to which one could attribute a biography, as if specific local areas found themselves subject to some cunning neo-Hegelian spirit of time and place by which the new was surreptitiously influenced. It sounds like a fanciful author’s conceit. But the persistence of historic patterning midst a current dynamic of change is remarkable — one only has to visit the City of London to witness this reality (Wood Street, in particular).

Nevertheless, a local view suggests a metropolis currently undergoing significant change. In many ways, London is unrecognisable to those familiar with the place as it was merely a few decades ago. This is not only true of the East End, but also of south London. The entire city is more cohesive and dynamic than ever. If there is regret here, it is possibly in the fact that there is no such things as a ‘secret London’ — as guide books sometimes suggest — and that characterful areas such as Soho, Covent Garden, Brick Lane and others are increasingly themed, as if to parody themselves. However, there is such a wealth to its places and spaces that it seems to take the best part of a lifetime to become even generally familiar with it all, despite the assistance of an imaginary patterning which, on the surface, often reads as more discordant than harmonious and orderly. This contemporary guide hopes to encourage that learning and enjoyment by focusing upon what can be seen to be currently going on.

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Right: steel ‘flower’ on the the facade of Fawood Nursery, by Will Alsop.

London's architectural geography

London's architectural geography

Updated: 25th September 2014 — 10:57 pm