You can catch all of that in one, wide ranging review. But now turn around, away from this nodal point around the Tower and walk through the back streets of the City toward the ‘navel’ of the City: the area around Bank. Here, you will be at the centre of a metropolitan area that can no longer afford rigid planning policies, which must always be ready to adapt its physical fabric in order to provide the buildings corporations consider to be most appropriate to global financial trading. Examples of change are likely to be all around. And sometimes this dynamic of renewal forms fascinating groupings overlaid upon a historical context that insists upon manifesting itself.
To get there you would walk past Fenchurch Street Station (opened in 1841, above which is a ‘60’s office building re-clad by Allies & Morrison).
On the east side of the station forecourt is the Richard Rogers’ studio’s design for Lloyd’s Register. Down the street is the massive bulk of Arup’s Plantation Place. Ahead, you will probably be able to see the blue cranes on top of Rogers’ Lloyd’s ‘86 building and, of course, the dark, enigmatic shape of Foster’s Swiss Re building (the ‘Gherkin’, behind which is an overwhelmed but fine building by Berlage). In fact, there is good architecture everywhere around. And this is what is so unique about the City: it is at once the oldest, most dense and architecturally rich part of the metropolis. The strangeness of these qualities was underscored in a recent history of London written by Peter Ackroyd. In his Biography of London, Ackroyd advances the peculiar notion that London is like some living animal. It sounds romantic. But the more one pores over the fabric of the place and relates current architectural events to history, the more the notion becomes tolerably plausible! This is nowhere more apparent than around Wood Street — what was once the north-south axis of a Roman fort dominating Londinium. Just to its north, where once stood a City gate called Cripplegate and now sits the Terry Farrell Alban Gate building, sitting upon what was designed as Route Eleven (and now London Wall), there is the Barbican. It is an islanded, latter-day fortress, complete with ‘gates’ (Chamberlin Powell and Bon). And back on Wood Street there is McMorran’s strange and wonderful City Police Station, near where a prison once stood. All around there are the sites and remains of former churches and churchyards. And squeezed inbetween them is a conglomeration of interesting office buildings: three by Foster, one by Rogers and another by Grimshaw.
Just to the east of this fascinating mix is the Guildhall — the City’s town hall. Its northern part looks rather like the Tate Modern without the chimney but with the addition of windows. Both were designed around the same time by an ageing Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, who also restored the fine medieval Guildhall itself, immediately to the south. If you were to go around to the piazza that sits in front of this latter building you would have a fine Sir Christopher Wren church (St. Lawrence Jewry) on the south and, on the west, the main body of the Corporation’s offices housed in another design from Scott’s office, but immediately after his death. It is as if the old man was still warm in his grave and a younger generation were grabbing the opportunity to be fashionable! Wren churches, neo-Baroque ‘grand manner’ bank buildings, and all kinds of bits and pieces of history mixed up with an astounding rate of change that characterises the contemporary City.
It is worth noting that the political boundary of the City is in the centre of Fleet Street, where the Temple Bar once stood (now re-erected in Paternoster); however, it’s geographical western boundary is the north-south route of Farringdon Road, beneath which the old Fleet River still runs (the road runs down to Blackfriars Bridge). Expansion in this direction is constrained by the Temple (although the newspapers moving out of Fleet Street after 1970 helped). Expansion to the north and east is constrained by social issues. And so a jump across the river (as at More London) was logical.
The other available direction of expansion is, of course, upward. Tall building policy fits in with these constraints and the invisible ones of views to St. Paul’s Cathedral, generating relatively few places where these can be located — as with the Gherkin, and similar tall buildings planned around that area (including more by Foster and Rogers). Note how the mass of buildings around St. Paul’s are kept low. Around London Bridge Station is another south-side vertical expansion point, where a design by Renzo Piano awaits letting viability before construction can begin.
The ‘Square Mile’ is a name given to the City of London simply because that more or less equates with its area. Its focus is at Bank and, traditionally, it was held that no respectable address was more than ten minutes walk from the Bank of England – which effectively was within the old Roman walls. Such traditions held until commparatively recently, through to the 1980’s, at which time the City began to seek out expansion opportunities. It leap Farringdon Road (its western geographical boundary, if not its formal political boundary) to the Fleet Street area. It leap across the River Thames
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– something unimaginable before the docklands closures. And it expanded north on the railway lands around Broadgate and Liverpool Street rail stations. Any eastward expansion has always been difficult because this implies a push into the east End, especially into the traditional immigrant area around the Brick Lane (Aldgate and Whitechapel). This process is still continuing, but the City long ago recognised that it also had to go upward as well as outward
– hence the pattern of new and emerging tall buildings which insinuate themselves inbetween the viewing corridors from London’s high points to St. Paul’s Cathedral. Internally, change also continues in the form of the replacement and major refurbishment of older buildings, even those completed in the 1980’s (such as the former Stock Exchange and the former Barclays Bank HQ). Much of the latter takes place in a heartland still characterised by a street pattern that is recognisably medieval – a place where back alleys still remain, providing an alternative way to explore the City’s architectural delights.
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Bank is a place where something like eight roads crush together at a single focal point like jobbers onto a good deal. This is the geographical and symbolic heart of British capitalism, at the centre of a City Conservation Area (that now covers over one third of the City) and a wonderful group of buildings by architects of significance. At one time it was rather important to have an address within ten minutes walk of here (in effect, within the old city walls). Whilst the most dominant and prestigious building is now the Bank of England, the design product of John Soane and one of Britain’s better known inter-war architects, Herbert Baker, it is the Royal Exchange that best establishes the principle of historical continuity and was for a long time one of the most important buildings in the City. In addition, there is Dance’s Mansion House, Stirling’s No.1 Poultry, the Lutyens’ Midland Bank, Hawksmoor’s St. Mary Woolnoth, and Wren’s St. Stephen Walbrook.
1 The church of St. Stephen Walbrook, 1672
1 – 80, is among the better Wren churches in
the City (on the south east side of Bank) — a centrally organised church damaged in wartime bombing and now fully restored with a modern
altar by Henry Moore (1972), sitting at the heart of an interior with distinctly ‘Scandinavian blonde’ overtones set against the dark browns of Wren’s late C17 aesthetic (which still includes the pulpit). Worth a visit. The steeple is particularly fine, as are most of those on Wren’s City churches.
9 The Mansion House, with its squashed 2 portico facing onto the Bank junction, is the official residence of the Lord Mayor of the City of London (nowadays little more than an symbolic figurehead who markets the City). It was designed by George Dance the Elder in 1739 – 52, originally having two tall additions above the pediment line – lopped off (as if in some Freudian gesture) by his son, George Dance the Younger. The pediment sculptures depict the City defeating Envy and Bringing Plenty (one wonders what Foucault would do with that).
О The Bank of England is the most significant building at Bank. It is monolithic and fills the entire urban ^ block, but should be read as two buildings: Sir John Soane’s original work dating from 1788-1808, and Sir Herbert Baker’s work which rises above the perimeter walls, from 1922 – 39. The former is a superbly articulated fortress, an original ‘ground-scraper’, filling the block, with few external openings in its expertly articulated perimeter wall. Behind it was a masterful complex inspired by the buildings of Ancient Rome, drawing daylight from above into rooms where clerks made up their books by lamp-light. By Baker’s time, the architect could throw a power switch and achieve the same effect and his architecture removes Soane’s work and rises up proudly in its place from behind the old walls. Quite properly, Baker has been vilified for obliterating Soane’s masterpiece, but even his work has features to enjoy. (Especially if the Bank is open for Open House London — an occasion when you might be able to make comparisons with the similar grand interiors of Edwin Cooper’s former Port of London Authority building at Tower Hill. Cooper has a former NatWest bank building on the opposite corner, done about the same time as the Lutyens building; he was the architect of the first custom-
| design Lloyds building in the 1920’s.) However, Soane’s (mostly blank) walls are, in themselves, an architectural delight and worth a perambulation all the way around (and they include, on the northern side, a statue of the man himself).
It was once considered of great importance to work within a ten minute walk of the Bank of England. This had less to do with convenience than some arcane relation to the old Roman walls and the traditional status of the City of London as a semi-autonomous state within a city. This juncture continues to exercise a curious influence and attract important architecture and architects — which ever way one turns there is an important