London 5: More Building Babble

Jessica and I have now officially left London, but I have a bunch more thoughts, photos, stories, etc. that I’ll finish writing up over the next week or two, so expect a small barrage of posts–a couple shortish and a couple might be kinda epic.

Today I want to write about how we encountered London–mostly through observing its buildings. With COVID raging, winter temperatures keeping people off the streets, and not a ton of time to really “meet” people anyway, we spent most of our days just wandering one neighborhood after another looking at the detritus of a few thousand years of people’s structures (though, most are from the last century-and-a-half-or-so).

First of all, let’s talk about what London is not.

London is not New York. It’s even flatter than Manhattan (which is actually surprisingly hilly). From New York’s Central Park or when wandering along the rivers you can get magnificent views of giant chunks of the city. And you get to see the dips and swells of skyscrapers, brownstones, and more that make up the landscape. In London, the only place you can get much of a view is from along the Thames, and those views tend to be very limited because most of the largest buildings (the skyscrapers of the City, for instance) are right there, blocking everything else from view. So, instead of grand vistas, London tends to present itself in hidden corners. You take a left turn and suddenly you’re somewhere new and different. Not always beautiful, but often unique.

London also is not Paris (or Prague or Vienna or whatever gleaming European capital you have in mind). In many of those cities, somewhere in the past few hundred years, much of the city was torn down and rebuilt with a fairly uniform aesthetic and often with somewhat straighter roads. London burned to the ground in 1666…and then they decided to rebuild it along the exact same insane medieval streets they’d had before (but this time with stone and brick, not wood). They had their chance and they didn’t take it. This also helps explain the lack of grand vistas. No Fifth Avenue. Any street that large in London (Regent Street, perhaps) is bound to take a twist or a turn within a few blocks.

Bu what London does have is just a wild variety of architectural styles. There’s a lot more glass towers stretching skyward than I remember from 1999, but that’s also mixed with truly ancient buildings and tons of housing and major public institutions developed in the Victorian era and over the 20th Century. To give you an overview of this mad mix, take a look at these photots, some focusing on views that take it all in and others just showing some outlier styles.

Despite this insane variety, one style of building is everywhere, and that’s the terrace house. We might call these row houses in the US. The style was evidently imported from Italy and began to become popular in the 1600s. They were originally for the wealthy, but later expanded to a variety of class ranges, as you may be able to tell from some of these photos…

That first picture above is from the street, Shepherdess Walk, one block over from ours. It was really quite lovely for a kinda nothing-special area. In some areas, these terrace homes are clearly quite palatial, and in others much more simple. But they really are e v e r y w h e r e.

One other thing that’s everywhere: chimneys. I’ve never seen so many chimneys. Look back through the above photos and you’ll see that there’s about half a dozen per house. What’s happening in there? No one knows…

Of course, terrace houses are now pretty dang expensive, and so huge chunks of the London populace also live in giant apartment buildings. Some, like ours, are formerly industrial buildings that have been repurposed, but most of the big apartment blocks were originally developed to provide decent housing for the working class. Some of those were built by philanthropists, like the Guinness Trust buildings discussed previously or the many constructed by George Peabody. This was particularly prevelant in the Victorian era. But most of these are more recent, and were built in the 20th century by the councils of the various boroughs of London and thus are sometimes called “council housing.” However, as I understand it, most of these are no longer publicly controlled due to privatization laws passed under Thatcher. Regardless of their origin, giant council housing blocks–some big towers, others endless blocks of smaller apartment buildings–were also ubiquitous, at least in Hackney and Islington, the two boroughs our flat was closest too (we were almost exactly on the line between the two).

Many of these council housing blocks were known as “estates,” which sounded a little odd to my ‘murican ears. Then again, there were many apartment buildings that were called “mansions,” so I decided I’d better just get used to being confused.

Honestly, that photo of the “mansions” in Kensington reminded me of just the sheer number of cool old buildings of one type or another we encountered. These ranged from the gorgeous hotel at the front of St. Pancras Station (that was at a central crossroads of our travels through the city) to the odd but pleasant “Brewer’s Buildings” that we discovered only a few blocks from home on our very last night in town. In some places the “old” were giant stone edifices, in others brick, most had amazing details–arches, friezes, statues, gargoyles, and more–and some just stood out for their simplicity.

One particular older architectural feature that I quite enjoyed were the various shopping “arcades” in central London. The one on the left, the Royal Arcade, is home to the fancy chocolate shop I worked in for all of a week (before being uncerimoniously “let go” after Valentine’s Day had passed) back in ’99.

Those arcades and the various little narrow passages, tunnels, and such connecting various streets (see previous post) are partly a result of just the sheer irregularity of the layout of the city. This is most true in the City of London, but also remains true throughout Greater London–there just aren’t that many streets that remain straight for more than a few blocks, and, as a result, a ton of the intersections just aren’t at right angles. This, of course, results in buildings of highly varied shapes, often narrow wedges to fit into the gaps, or curving facades to match the streets in front. One of my favorite spots with this aspect was the “Seven Dials” interesection where–you guessed it–seven streets meet at one corner.

One of the more interesting architectural features I found around the city was that many of the necessary industrial buildings–power and water regulation facilities, for instance–were often quite lovely. Many of them are housed in exteriors that mask their function and often added an artistic element to their neighborhoods. Here’s one–a plant that turns underground waste heat into energy–that was a few blocks from out home.

Of course, architectural elements like that were just one aspect of the building boom happening in London. Over the last few decades more and more fancy glassy buildings have been going up all over the place. Some of them I’ve already mentioned (the Shard, the Gherkin, the Walkie Talkie, the Kardashian, etc.), but there’s really a ton of crazy new buildings all over the place. Some are interesting. Some are artistic. Some are hideous. Some fit nicely into their surroundings. Some really don’t. Some I found oddly pleasant (the Byron, for instance), and some really missed the mark (like the apartments in Vauxhall that are meant to look like boats). Here’s a few examples…

Of course, in the City, the concentration of such buildings is higher, and that allows some interesting elements. In particular, I learned to enjoy the elevated walkways throughout the area. In particular, I liked some of the interesting choices about how to support those walkways, like this one…

Of course, beyond the simply unfortunate choices of some of the buildings above, there were a few that absolutely missed the mark. Three particularly egregious examples:

• Minster Court seems to have a building that’s meant to look like a modernization of a medieval cathedral or something, but it just ends up looking like some sort of pointy hulking beast. Jessica had quite a strong visceral reaction to this one, literally hurrying away.
• A very odd modern apartment building near Clissold Park was probably the most hideous thing I saw. This is in an otherwise quiet neighborhood of terrace houses with a gorgeous park across the street, but the sad yellow color and weird floating metallic wrapping looked like some sort of experiment gone wrong. Maybe in an area where there were more similar sized buildings this might stand out as interesting and unusual, but here it dominated the skyline and was just a complete eyesore. (Also, next to it, note the “save the mulberry tree” sign that was next to a large stump. That just added to the sadness.)
• Finally, one of the areas we walked through a lot (it was about a mile due south of us) was the Barbican Estates. This is basically the only housing in the City of London. It’s a giant brutalist set of concrete towers. There’s nothing nice to say about them at all…except that in amongst them they have an absolutely gorgeous set of pools and some great public space (not to mention museums, a regular concert series, and tons of other events). Such an odd contrast there.

But, the most truly frightening building we saw was in the extremely upscale neighborhood of Chelsea. The old Michelin Tyre building featured some early 20th century stained glass images of the Michelin man. The one over the entrance is frightening enough, but the one around the side has him not only kicking passersby in the face, but doing that while smoking a cigar. So weird…

I think that’s enough building babble for now. More on other aspects of London soon…