Birmingham has two very large public spaces, separated by the brutalist architecture of the public library. One with the town hall and next to the market and main shopping areas, and on the other side of the library, sits a more artistic quarter with theatres.
From fiery embers, phoenix like, the Crystal Palace is to be reborn. A shining glass emporium of culture to adorn the terraces of long neglected Sydenham. Except, that isn’t what is being planned.
Barely meeting its Thursday deadline, the long anticipated King’s Cross station got the wide plaza space in front of the original Victorian station building.
A modest little exhibition has opened in the British Museum that displays a number of prints of London under varying states of construction.
Over the next few weeks, people will start typing E20 in to websites as the first part of their address as they move into new flats built on the Olympic Park.
Even by the standards of the era it was built in, Selborne House — that sat opposite the Army and Navy store on Victoria Street — was a masterpiece of bland office design — a brown monolithic slab of drab.
In praise of Euston Railway StationMuch derided, in part for its admittedly shabby appearance and dated fascia, as for how it reduced the Euston Arch to rubble, Euston Station is not a particularly loved building.
A new exhibition about London’s infrastructure opened recently in the Building Centre that shows off the three dominant challenges for the city in the decades ahead.
There is a Big Red Shed on the SouthBankIf you have passed by the Southbank recently or crossed over Waterloo Bridge in a red bus, you might have struggled to avoid seeing a big red shed that has appeared next to the National Theatre.
Of the many post-war mistakes built in the City of London, one of the ugliest has managed to cling on determinedly, the black and steel monolith of St Alphage House.
For just under 500 years, Trinity House has been looking after the safety of seafarers around the coasts of Britain, but an organisation set up to save people from disaster seems to be rather unlucky with its own buildings.
As Private Eye is wont to say, it’s Grim up North London, but if the eponymous characters of that newspaper were to dart out of their shell, they might find a remarkable building peaking its tall spire above the council estates of Kilburn.
England’s oldest Lych-Gate found in South LondonIf you approach an old church, mainly in towns and villages rather than cities, you might enter the churchyard through a small wooden gate with a pitched roof. These small gatehouses though have a particularly macabre history, for this is…
Closed for 130 years, the public observation tower in central LondonIn 1834, a tall observation tower was opened to the public near to Trafalgar Square giving people a chance to look down on Pall Mall and overlook St James Park and Whitehall.
One of London’s longest office blocks has recently been undergoing a bit of a clean up and last week, I was able to have a look around the spartan interior before the new tenants move in. The building is the…
The gutted interior of the Arcola Theatre revealedLast January, the Arcola Theatre marked its 11th anniversary by moving into a new home, a former paint works and did what they could with the building to get it open in just a few weeks, but now thanks to an Art Council grant, they are undertaking a refurbishment of the site to make it more suitable for theatrical works.
Unbuilt London: Monumental buildings that never wereLast night I wandered along to the V&A for one of their Friday night events, mainly for a couple of exhibitions on “vanishing London” and “Buildings that were never built”.
Near Hyde Park, many years ago I found this rather charming local feature – and recently, I finally remembered to take a camera and photograph it. I originally found it when doing one of my random wanderings around, where I…
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