Architecture is commonly presented as an orderly, linear narrative. But for those of you keen to experience it (rather than read about it) architecture is a more complex mix that simultaneously comes to you from many directions, both literally and metaphorically. This is especially true in London, where the enthusiast has to be prepared to have a cacophony of historical periods, tastes, values, constructions, and scales thrust upon them all at once. You are called upon to cope — and it’s fun. As an architectural tourist you will have to piece together a puzzle when the individual parts are mixed up, when some are damaged, altered, added to or otherwise disguised, when some are missing and others don’t fit. You have to juggle and juxtapose, making your own order, constructing your own meanings and forming your own architectural geography.
Curiously, one frequently discovers these ornaments of the metropolis to be inscrutably mute, revealing little about themselves, both in terms of what they are and, especially, how they came to be what they are.
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Photo: Hanne Lund |
In this sense it is true to say that architecture has two dimensions to its narrative content. One is formal, evidence-based, and ostensibly rational and objective — the stuff of history books and the delight of academics. Such narratives tend to be coherent, orderly and reassuring to the extent that a building’s ostensible reasons for being are explained. But those involved in the making of architecture will also know another, parallel truth: one that is subjective, politically distorted and gossip-laden — that oral tradition picked up in bars, at dinner parties and within gossip – columns. These written and oral traditions develop in parallel and both bear their own truthfulness. However, attention to either the chat or an accepted academic history is but a complement to an aesthetic experience of the thing itself, on the street and as something one can penetrate, explore and come to know.
London is a wonderful place for such explorations. Its urbane mix of order and disorder, of overlapped and overlaid coherent meanings, of history and a contemporary dynamic, make it an excellent place for the architectural enthusiast to ‘meet with buildings’. Its West End, for example, is the epitome of urbanity — a place where one can play at being the flaneur, of being located at the heart of a dense and complex architectonic where (at its best) layers of architectural, man-made order are in constant interplay whilst being intruded upon by a benign strangeness, by the accidents and intrusions that make cities so exciting.
When I personally meet with good architecture — or even something partial and not entirely successful — it rarely fails to surprise me that someone did this thing and did it so well, with consideration and sensitivity as well as creative wit, that the thing exists at all. The building draws my admiration by means of an immediate aesthetic engagement, as if (absurdly) it were declaring, ‘Hi, I’m over here — are you paying attention?’. Creaturely sensuality, intellectualisations, and this aesthetic immediacy then sometimes mix together to produce that rewarding experience only architecture can engender.
And in pursuit of such architectural experience I find myself becoming more eclectic and stretching my values, becoming as excited by the parts as wholes, as fascinated by the ‘almost all right’ as the acknowledged icons, as intrigued by the implicit struggles and challenges that the materiality of a building bears witness to as by the actual thing in itself. Rather than reach simple conclusions, I find that architectural explorations are likely to deepen and become more complex.
It is with such things in the back of my mind that I offer you this guide to London’s contemporary architecture as a part of my own enjoyment of architecture and London’s constant regeneration.
The criteria for inclusion are inevitably subjective, but lean toward quality of experience, accessibility and the pavement experience. If a building entails significant travel effort, then it may have been excluded; similarly for any work of merit that is hidden away — what is privately accessible is something no guide book can cover. The point of noting nearby, older or buildings no longer fresh and now fading into the obscurity of London’s embrace is the presumption that it is architecture endeavour itself that excites you, not just contemporary novelty. Having said that, this is not a gazetteer.
Left: City restaurant.
Above: visitors to Queen Mary University medical building by Will Alsop.
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Charles Birch’s griffin, poised upon a pillar designed by Horace Jones, sits in the Strand opposite George Street’s Royal Courts of Justice (1872-84) and marks the western-most boundary of a part of London rich in architectural interest, perhaps more so than any similarly sized area in the metropolis. It is a place where contemporary developments have been insinuated into an ancient fabric whose street pattern is saturated with historical reference. In its efforts to stay modern, no other part of London changes so rapidly, and yet is so bound by tradition.
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Lighthouse, Moorgate Sculpture, Berlage building Flying swan, Moorgate The griffin in Fleet Street |
For a significant part of its history, the City of London has functioned as a social club whose physical limitations were circumscribed by a walk of ten minutes from its functional and symbolic heart at the Bank of England. Histories of the place (such as the superb quartet by David Kynaston) suggest that this was almost as true in the 1970’s as it had been in the 1920’s or even fifty years before that. However, the City did began to change significantly after WWII, even if there was little significant rebuilding until about 1960. Pevsner’s mid ‘50’s survey of the City deplored what he termed ‘the shockingly lifeless and reactionary’ new building work, but 1959 saw new regulations that prompted what has been described as ‘an orgy of new building’ and with this came Modernist fashions not deflected until Post-Modernism arrived as a transatlantic import in the mid and later 1970’s. After that time — particularly during the so-called ‘Big Bang’ of mid-1980’s deregulation — the City not only became socially more open, but enjoyed new architectural fashions as it broke traditional geographical boundaries, spread and engendered satellites. In these years the financial district extended east into the heart of the former Docklands, particularly to Canary Wharf. It spread west across the geographical boundary of Farringdon Road (beneath which the Fleet River still runs), into the Fleet Street properties left vacant by the newspapers who had also moved east. And it even crossed south of the river, to Southwark.
Whilst the City remains substantially mono-functional, it would be true to say that it has evolved from a small, inward – looking place to an amorphous beast with a strong centre of gravity but without the readily perceptible historic boundaries it once enjoyed — boundaries that have been, in effect, those of Roman and medieval London. And, in parallel, there have been signs that the monoculture might be diluted, but mixed use remains anathema to developers.
Meanwhile, smaller sites continue to aggregate into larger ones as the dynamics of urban renewal once again provide London with the privatised streets we thought had long vanished (e. g. that pride of low-rise / high-density office buildings, Merrill Lynch).
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Left: the ‘Gherkin’ from Mile End. Top right: the griffin, outside the Royal Courts of Justice; a Banksy graffiti; a sculptured swan near to the Institute of Chartered Accountants; a ship sculpture on the Berlage building near to the ‘Gherkin’; and a corner lighthouse, also near to the Institute of Chartered Accountants. |
If there is currently an outstanding architectural debate in the City, it has to be the issue of tall buildings. Older ‘skyscrapers’ such as the NatWest Tower (now Tower 42) have been remodelled and rebranded; newer ones such as Fosters ‘Erotic Gherkin’ have literally given the City a new profile. Proposals for tall buildings continue to be made, although it is expected there will be a lull in demand that will inevitably kill some of these off.
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Leadenhall Market The City griffin |
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Gailrd CHlVTHUlkin |
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Stand outside Tower Hill tube station, on the eastern boundary edge of the City, and you see around you almost 2000 years of London history. In front there are the remains of a Roman wall built sometime around AD50 and now embedded in later medieval additions. Beyond that wall is the moat and walls of the Tower of London, built during the C11 by William the Conqueror as alterations to the Roman fort formerly on this site. To the right, overlooking Trinity Square, sits a baroque pile designed by Sir Edwin Cooper (1912-22; architect of the first Lloyd’s building) for the Port of London Authority (PLA), an organisation which attempted to govern activities within a complex spreading eastward from ‘the Pool’ beneath London Bridge, one serving trade from what was the world’s first global empire and a facility plagued by pilfering and managerial problems. On its east side is Trinity House, designed by Samuel Wyatt in 1792 for those who were guardians of coastal shipping traffic and governors of the lighthouses of England and Wales. In front of it sits a memorial garden and a small edifice designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens and dedicated to the many sailors who died in WWI. To the left, is the Arup’s designed entrance to the Docklands Light Railway – access to the former Docklands area, for a long time one of the largest areas of urban renewal in Europe. Further over is Tower Bridge (built to a design by the architect Horace Jones and the engineer John Wolfe-Barry, 1886-94). Beyond that you will see the smallest, newest, and most expensive of the upstream London docks: Thomas Telford’s St. Katherine’s Dock, opened in 1828 and now a marina. On its north-west corner is a formulaic (but successful) office building by the Lord Richard Rogers’ studio. And, opposite it, on the west side of the Tower is a recent office building by Lord Norman Foster (a building with a fine external area unfortunately patrolled by difficult security guards). Across the bridge is the spire of Southwark Cathedral (C12, but heavily ‘restored’ in the C19), and Butlers Wharf – a compact area of docklands renewed in the last decade, but remaining one of the more coherent parts of the former docks. And still on the other side of the Thames you can see More Place — a huge development of speculative buildings by Foster (again), together with the ‘strawberry’ of the development: London’s newest symbol of civic pride, City Hall, the ‘blob’ that is home to the Greater London Authority and the Mayor of London. |