the City of London is where the old and new actually seem to talk to each other. you can be walking through a tight street, pass a church or an old market, look up and find a glass tower leaning into the sky above it. it’s a weird mix, but it feels like the mix belongs there. the buildings don’t all look as if they came from the same meeting.
part of that is the street plan. the City grew over a very long time, and bits of its Roman, Saxon and medieval routes are still in the pattern of streets and lanes. new towers didn’t arrive on an empty site. they had to meet the older streets, buildings and views around them. the City Corporation’s character study even describes the tower cluster as a kind of “palimpsest”: buildings from different periods jostling together. it has 28 conservation areas, but it hasn’t tried to freeze the whole place in one period.
the towers have to fit into something
that’s why the Gherkin, the Walkie Talkie and the Leadenhall Building can sit among much older streets without making the City feel like a brand-new business park. some of them are strange shapes; some of them are too much. but the tallest buildings are concentrated in the Eastern Cluster, and decisions about height and design have to reckon with nearby heritage and views. look around the City Cluster and the contrast is the point: modern towers, older churches, warehouses and the small turns of the street all share the same tight space.
it isn’t all accidental. the City’s adopted Local Plan directs tall buildings to suitable places in the Eastern Cluster and rules them out in conservation areas and protected views around St Paul’s. it asks new proposals to respect the size of historic plots, street patterns, frontage, scale and pedestrian routes. the adopted plan sets out those controls. the good bits feel like they’ve been negotiated: something new gets built, but the older place still gets a say.
canary wharf feels like it was drawn in one go
Canary Wharf has a different origin. after the docks closed, the government set up the London Docklands Development Corporation in 1981 and designated the Isle of Dogs an enterprise zone the next year, with land-assembly powers and planning and tax incentives to attract investment. new transport links were part of the package. SOM then created a masterplan for more than twenty building sites, transport connections and public spaces across the former Docklands. The GLA’s history of Docklands and SOM’s account of the masterplan show how coordinated the development was. it created an impressive business district, but from the beginning it was designed as one.
but when i’m there, the neatness can make it feel a bit soulless. the towers are polished, the paths are clean, the plazas are open, and everything seems to have a job. it can feel like you’re moving through a very well-designed office lobby that happens to be outdoors. there’s less of that feeling that people have worn the corners down, added a shop where it made sense, or changed a building because the city around it kept moving.
to be fair, Canary Wharf has good architecture and some lovely spaces by the water. it has also started adding homes and a wider mix of uses. the original masterplan even included public plazas, gardens and transport links; SOM describes it as a framework for a new district. i can see why someone would love its order. it just feels managed to me in a way the City doesn’t.
mess is part of the character
the City is hardly a perfect human place either. it can be windy, confusing, expensive and strangely quiet outside working hours. plenty of new buildings are clumsy. but the best parts have layers you can actually feel: a lane bends, an old church appears between offices, then a huge new tower blocks half the sky. each building is carrying a different bit of London’s history, and they all have to share the same pavement.
that’s what i like. the City hasn’t been designed to look like one finished idea. it keeps absorbing new ones. Canary Wharf feels like architecture arranged for a clear image; the City feels like architecture trying to get along with everything that was already there. i know which one i’d rather spend time wandering through.