By Michael F. Duggan
“You have to give this much to the Luftwaffe. When it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble.”
-Prince Charles
The Prince of Wales got it right: on the whole, modern British architecture is pretty bad.
In recent years, I have become increasingly alarmed by the newfound verticality of London as it continues on its dubious adventure as Europe’s capital of finance and economic globalization. From the classic sprawling horizontal metropolis with few landmarks higher than St. Paul’s, Big Ben, Tower Bridge, and Westminster Abby, the big money boys (and girls) of new Londontown are bent on making it just another nondescript 21st century copse of abominable high-rises. My guess is that this is the result of the misguided desires of new money types to trash history in favour of something approximating a less interesting version of New York City. Perhaps it is just an expression of the common human mania for the new.
Taken individually, some of the buildings are not so bad, as far as glass and steel go (although, as the Scarlet Pimpernel reminds us, “there is nothing quite so bad as something which is not so bad”), and I know that not all of them are products of British architects or firms. It is just that a modern vertical city has to work as an integrated collective work of art—a giant crystal garden—like Manhattan, if it is to work at all. Modern London, by contrast, looks like Old London with patches of Bahrain or Dubai pushing through the ground like mushrooms after a rain.
My revulsion at what London is becoming got me thinking back to an idea I had a number of years ago, that the historical phases of London and its development provides a kind of Rorschach or Myers-Briggs personality test, and the period of London that you like or most identify with tells a lot about you.
So, which is it? Are you the former classics major enraptured with archeological depictions of the Roman Old City of Londinium? Do you like the dirty, malororous, half-timber city of the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern period—the city of Shakespeare that burned in the Great Fire of 1666? Is it the rebuilt city of Charles II (who straddled periods of the city, among other things), Nell Gwynn, Lord Rochester, Christopher Wren, William Defoe, and Moll Flanders—the London of the Restoration and Augustinian period? Is it the imperial capital of the world of mercantilist globalization, the Georgian city of William Hogarth, William Pitt (both Elder and Younger), and Edmund Burke? Is it the teaming London of Dickens, Ebenezer Scrooge, Bill Sykes, the Artful Dodger, and Victoria and Albert and the Crystal Palace? Is it the diverse, gas-lit metropolis of Conan-Doyle, Holmes and Watson, and Jack the Ripper? Or is it Heroic London of Churchill and the Blitz or Swinging London of The Beatles, Stones, and Julie Christie?
Take you time answering this question; you may pick more than one or arrange them in descending order of preference. And in conversation, pay attention to the answers of other people and their reasons for their choice(s).
So, the next time you are at a party and you meet a historical or cosmopolitan type, ask him/her “what’s you period of London?” If they say “Jane Austen” (as opposed to “Lord Byron”) or “21st century,” make a polite break for the door.