GREENWICH

From Blackheath

London does not lend itself to views. It lies in a basin of thick clay, across which the Thames winds in a succession of meanders. The metropolis is hard to see from a distance, the few vantage points being from greensand outcrops mostly in the suburbs. Most of these offer little beyond an undistinguished horizon and rarely much by way of foreground.

Not so Greenwich. Here the Thames runs against the hill of Blackheath and veers to the north. For centuries this point marked the entry to London from the sea and overland from Canterbury and Dover. Only as London’s docks developed upstream on the north bank did Greenwich lose importance. Sailors acknowledged it as their landfall, and the red ball on the observatory still drops daily at 1.00 p.m., for setting maritime chronometers. But Greenwich, variously as royal palace, hospital, college and museum, has always seemed a town apart.

The most celebrated view is by Canaletto from across the Thames. It shows Wren’s great palace with barges gliding before it over a sunlit river, a picture of regal serenity recognisable today. This view is now rivalled by that in the opposite direction, downhill from Greenwich Park. The palace remains in the foreground but as a gilded gateway to the new commercial London of Docklands rising in the distance. It is the one London view that can accurately be described as sensational and I give it precedence.

The vantage point is from the top of Greenwich Park, reached from Blackheath by the Royal Observatory. As we approach along the avenue we wonder why the statue of General Wolfe at the end has his back to us, apparently looking into space. At the last minute we see the reason. The park falls suddenly away at our feet, a greensward flanked by trees and rolling steeply downhill with all the eastern half of London beyond.

Old London battles new: Greenwich with Canary Wharf beyond

In the eighteenth century the poet William Gifford wrote of this prospect of London from the South-East:

How pleasant from that dome-crowned hill
To view the varied scene below,
Woods, ships, and spires, and, lovelier still,
The encircling Thames’ majestic flow!

Byron’s Don Juan was less complimentary. He saw London as ‘a huge dun cupola, like a foolscap crown/ on a fool’s head’. To Turner and others, this was the definitive prospect of London from a distance.

That view has gone. There are no more ships and spires, while the Thames is only glimpsed between buildings, as if a moat to the new Docklands. But in the foreground is still the Queen’s House, commissioned in 1616 for Anne of Denmark, wife to James I. The architect, Inigo Jones, had recently returned from Italy and proposed ‘a curious device . . . according to rules, masculine and unaffected’. His clean, white rectangle was revolutionary in Jacobean England. It is simple and lovely, flanked by nineteenth-century colonnades drawing the eye to the later buildings of Greenwich Palace below.

View of London from Greenwich, JMW Turner, 1825

This palace was begun by Charles II on his restoration, abandoned and then resumed in 1692 by Sir Christopher Wren under William and Mary. It was to be a naval hospital and monument to their generosity. Two domed and colonnaded wings run down the slope to the water’s edge, framing the Queen’s House from below and above. Their use evolved from naval hospital and then college to the present university and maritime museum.

From the park above, Wren’s domes have lost their pre-eminence. They must now fight against a backdrop of bruising skyscrapers in Canary Wharf. When this development was begun in the 1980s, I wondered if it could ever succeed. It was the office equivalent of an out-of town shopping mall, an ersatz city-within-a-city, almost inaccessible on foot and with no sense of neighbourhood.

Canary Wharf initially went bankrupt, despite being freed of regulation and taxes and supplied with new road and rail links. Regularly portrayed as an icon of capitalism, it was the most heavily subsidised development in England. But modern Docklands is a commercial success, its skyscrapers shimmering in the sunlight as if newly imported from the Persian Gulf. A light railway snakes among their depths.

Sandwiched between Greenwich and Canary Wharf is the green mound of the Mudchute Park. It was created of spoil and ballast from the old docks and is now home to London’s largest urban farm. This has yielded the remarkable telephoto shot of a llama standing on a hillock backed by a curtain wall of office blocks.

To the east we see relics of the grand projects – perhaps follies – that tend to litter the outskirts of bombastic world cities. On the Greenwich peninsula stands the carapace of the Millennium Dome, now the O2 entertainment arena, with its cable car to the north bank. Beyond are the ice-cream scoops of the Thames barrier. To the north up the Lee valley is the ghost of the 2012 Olympic Stadium and Anish Kapoor’s Orbit at Stratford. Epping Forest crowns the horizon beyond.

To the west rise the towers of the City of London. The success of Canary Wharf drove the City Corporation into a frenzy of imitation, demolishing a swathe of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century districts north and east of its centre. Rather than copy Westminster and use historic streets as a template for renewal, the City copied Docklands. What might have been a planned corridor of growth east into Essex became two exclusive outcrops of wealth, glaring at each other across a valley of poverty. But they make a good view.

THE CITY

From the Monument

Since London lacks strong contours near its centre, views must be either of towers or seen by climbing them. But there are towers and towers. Those of Tuscany’s San Gimignano carry the patina of age. Those of New York are clustered by zoning regulation, while those of Paris, Madrid and most European cities are banished from historic centres and planned on the outskirts.

Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper

London’s skyline has evolved spasmodically. Over most of the metropolis towers have risen at random, wherever an enterprising developer has been able to cajole or con the authorities into indulging him. Views of St Paul’s are occasionally protected by the City of London and this has guarded its aspect to the west. There was to be a cluster of towers in the east of the City along the Gracechurch Street–Bishopsgate axis. But rules have been so often breached that the policy is hardly noticeable. In regulating a horizon, one exception destroys a rule and London’s horizon is a forest of exceptions.

Panoramas of London are now offered from the tops of many tall buildings, including Centre Point, Tower Forty Two, the London Eye and, highest of all, Bermondsey’s Shard. But from these heights London looks much like a map of roofs. I prefer to see its towers, like mountains in the Lake District, from ‘half-way up’. My favourite therefore remains Wren’s old vantage point, The Monument. What was once a lofty lookout is now like a tree platform in a jungle. Structures loom up on all sides, enlivened by the occasional kestrel and cars and buses streaming below.

The Monument was commissioned by the City of London in 1676 and built by Wren and his assistant, Robert Hooke, to commemorate the great fire of 1666. Its height, 202 feet, is also the distance between its base and the seat of the fire. It was placed in the most conspicuous spot, so that anyone crossing old London Bridge was greeted by the steeple of St Magnus Martyr and by this secular assertion of London’s rebirth. The Monument has 311 steps and remains the tallest accessible stone column in the world. It was intended to double as a telescope and hollow tube for scientific experiments, James Boswell had a panic attack when climbing it. The flaming ball on top is described in Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit as casting a shadow on the street below ‘with every hair erect upon his golden head, as if the doings of the city frightened him’.

The top reveals a 360-degree panorama both up and down the Thames, offering a sometimes hilarious insight into London’s planning failures. The attempt to retain some view of the Tower of London has left just the tips of its turrets visible. Tower Bridge remains clear, with the bulbous mayor’s office lurking like a snail on the bank next to it. Beyond rise the towers of Canary Wharf and the heights of Blackheath. Upstream is moored the old cruiser HMS Belfast, looking splendidly incongruous. Due south on Lower Thames Street we fight to see St Magnus Martyr, Eliot’s ‘inexplicable splendour of Ionian white and gold’. It once dominated the entry to the City over old London Bridge, but is now dominated by commercial buildings.

To the south looms the shadow of the Shard. Located on the south bank, it was strongly opposed by the City as unbalancing its eastern cluster. It is sleek and huge, a ‘vertical city’ deferring to no concept of scale, visual context or social purpose. It was intended merely as a ‘statement’ of London’s wealth, placed in what was a poor part of London when so large a structure would never have been tolerated north of the river. It is now an unavoidable feature of the London skyline, absent from none of my London views except Richmond.

The Thames bank westwards takes its cue from the Shard. A series of slabs and towers is expected to form a wall of glass running along the river past Westminster to Vauxhall. The river’s wide loop north will thrust this wall up towards the West End, making its towers visible across west London. Even Moscow balked at skyscrapers so near its historic centre.

The City foreground of The Monument to the west remains a minor miracle. The roofline from here has been mostly protected as far as St Paul’s and the cathedral still rides above it as Wren intended. The one lapse is Rem Koolhaas’s Rothschild bank, whose box tower intrudes on the view, reminding the City that financial muscle still writes its own rules. A superb close-up of the St Paul’s east front can be had from a viewing platform on top of One New Change at the end of Watling Street.

The view north is completely different. This has all the buzz of crude commercial architecture let rip. To the left of Bishopsgate are the towers that defied the cluster, those of Tower Forty Two, London Wall and the Barbican. To the right is a lowering cliff of glass, cast in the geometrical shapes fashionable at the turn of the twenty-first century and craving nicknames, the Gherkin, the Helter-Skelter, the Cheese-grater. An attempt was made to step their profiles down Gracechurch Street towards the river. This failed with the erection of the colossal Walkie-Talkie on Fenchurch Street. It does not taper but the opposite, leering outwards towards the river, its upper floors overhanging the lower ones to capitalise on higher rents. In the City money does not just talk, it screams.

The heavy footfall of these buildings not only crushes the older one – the once-dominant Lloyds building on Leadenhall Street now seems almost quaint – but leaves the medieval maze of alleyways, courts and churchyards close to obliteration. Those that remain are the one distinctive feature of London as an office capital, crammed with cafés and boutiques, not waving but drowning. I feel like a man aboard the last ship afloat amid a sea of icebergs, tossing life-rafts to those struggling in the water.

PARLIAMENT SQUARE

From the Abbey Sanctuary

Big Ben stands bold over Westminster Bridge where, since 1859, it has marked the nation’s time and acted as its guardian angel. The tower presides with benign familiarity over the institutions and ceremonies of state. It introduces each day’s television news and is the capital’s most recognisable logo. As visual focus of the City of Westminster, it gathers up river, bridge and government quarter and commands their collective obedience to the gods of parliament.

Big Ben’s immediate environs are curiously disjointed. Most nations create spacious citadels round the heart of government, a Capitol, a Red Square or a Rajpath. London has the village green of Parliament Square, set in a moat of swirling traffic. It contains not even a seat, and tourists photographing Big Ben must cram onto a narrow pavement. Yet the general concourse stands firm in public affection. It is a licensed venue for public demonstration and woe betide any authority that tries to change it.

The towers of Westminster from the Sanctuary

The medieval city of Westminster developed a mile upstream of London as the capital’s ecclesiastical, legal and administrative base. The abbey of St Peter, founded by Edward the Confessor, was the home of national ritual. The Royal Palace of Westminster was the seat of government, its ‘courts’ giving their name to institutions of monarchy and law alike. Public offices grew up haphazard in its purlieus. Only in 1868 did the Victorians clear Parliament Square of a warren of government buildings to give the neighbourhood some dignity and allow citizens free passage. The square saw the world’s first traffic light.

As a result, it is hard today to get a single clear view of this national tableau without being knocked over by a bus or a scrum of tourists. The garden in front of the Supreme Court offers a good sight of Big Ben, but my best view is little known, from the ‘Olympic gold’ pillar box at the junction of Victoria Street and Tothill Street. It looks across the Abbey Sanctuary and fortuitously contrives to embrace Parliament Square, Big Ben, St Margaret’s, Westminster Abbey and the Victoria Tower in one frame, with the London Eye and the Shard peering over the horizon. It is a quiverful of towers, an enjoyable hotch-potch of famous buildings floating on a stream of traffic.

The view slices neatly left and right. Left is Methodist Central Hall, started in 1905 with ‘a million guineas from a million Methodists’. Its grandiose Edwardian baroque glares boldly across the road at the abbey of its old antagonist, the Church of England. Next to it on Storey’s Gate is Powell and Moya’s 1986 Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. A modernist building on a crucial site, its broken facade and layered elevation is not dominant and is wearing well. Beyond is the fussy neo-Elizabethan former Middlesex Guildhall, echo of the days when this was still a municipality in the old county of Middlesex. It now houses the Supreme Court.

Ahead across the square is Portcullis House, parliamentary offices designed in 1990 by Sir Michael Hopkins. Again Westminster has been well served by modern architecture. Its tapering pink stone pilasters and black oriel windows are in counterpoint to the gothic of Big Ben next door. The distinctive roof chimneys are like stovepipe hats on Puritan divines, breaking the roofline in what might seem an architectural satire. The wheel of the London Eye peers jokily down on the scene.

The Palace of Westminster was commissioned after the old parliament burned down in 1834. It was to be in a ‘gothic or Elizabethan style’, a bold revolt against the still-prevalent Georgian classicism. Designed by Charles Barry and adorned by Augustus Pugin, the composition is the world’s most bravura work of gothic revival, a balanced series of elevations whether seen from the river or the square.

The bell tower of Big Ben is largely Pugin’s, its profile so familiar its oddity defies analysis. Pevsner found it ‘completely unorthodox, a fairy tower of no archaeological precedent’. Pugin took its design from Scarisbrick Hall in Lancashire, which today looks like a pastiche. Its free gothic was to be imitated in public buildings across the land, as if a medieval clock-tower should serve as totem of the new Victorian dynamism.

Historic structures now crowd the scene. The roofline of old Westminster Hall is just visible to the right of Big Ben through the trees. It was begun by William Rufus in 1097 and was probably the largest secular building in Europe in its day. In front of it we have a clear view of St Margaret’s, the old parish church of Westminster, once crowded about with buildings but now exposed in its churchyard. It might still be dreaming itself in a quiet Middlesex village. The church is of little architectural interest, which makes it the more endearing in such company. Sir George Gilbert Scott’s adjacent north transept of Westminster Abbey aims a kick in its direction, as if trying to bully it off the site.

We now turn to the abbey’s west front, an old friend but to me rather sad. Its forecourt has been ruined by traffic engineers refusing to divert the Sanctuary road out of the square nearer to the QE II Centre. This forces the monarch, statesmen, processions, horses, carriages, cars and coaches to manoeuvre their ceremonial way to the cramped west door round an effete Victorian monument to the dead of Westminster School. I sometimes wonder who rules modern Britain, traffic or democracy.

The abbey facade is mostly medieval, much restored and with twin towers added by Hawksmoor in the 1730s. They are ostensibly gothic but have anachronistic baroque windows and classical cornices. We know them so well this no longer seems absurd. A proposed central tower for the abbey, which might have acted as a visual focus to the square and echoed Big Ben, has been suggested, most recently by the composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, but has never been built.

Immediately to the right of the facade we see the conical roof of the abbey Chapter House, containing its loveliest medieval interior. Next to it rises the dramatic return of Westminster Palace in the shape of Victoria Tower, strong and confident in its gothic but delightfully penned in by the roofs of Westminster School.

The Sanctuary is closed to the right by Scott’s building over the entrance to Dean’s Yard. It was designed not to compete with the abbey but to defer to its surroundings in unobtrusive Bath stone, with what Scott called an ‘accidental’ arrangement of ‘gabled fronts . . . parapets and dormers’. Such deference would be inconceivable in a modern architect. The yard behind is an oasis of ecclesiastical calm, its cloisters even more so.

FROM PRIMROSE HILL

Primrose Hill competes with Parliament Hill, Alexandra Palace and Shooter’s Hill to offer the best distant viewpoint over central London. Of these it has the widest panorama and the best foreground. I lived nearby for most of my life, and from the summit watched London’s skyline changing by the year. A grassy slope runs gently downhill to the Zoo where Regent’s Park still offers a dignified entry to the metropolis.

The hill’s survival is fortuitous. It was crown land, originally a hunting forest, left isolated to the north of St Pancras by the creation of Regent’s Park in the 1820s. The Eyre estate was building villas to the west in St John’s Wood and Eton was building to the north in Belsize Park. The hill had been a place of resort in the eighteenth century and was now threatened with new buildings. In 1829 a mausoleum was proposed, turning the slope into a giant ziggurat, with ninety-four tiers of profitable burial vaults.

Westminster from Primrose Hillover the Zoo, Big Ben just visible

With pressure mounting to save London’s ‘northern heights’ from development, an act was secured in 1842 to keep Primrose Hill as open space. Much was made of the need of Londoners for exercise and an ‘outdoor gymnasium’ even survives at the foot of the hill. On the summit a grove of trees lasted until the Second World War, when it was cut down for an anti-aircraft battery and the hill used to graze sheep.

Primrose Hill acquired a mystical personality when William Blake saw it as the location of ‘Jerusalem’s pillars of gold’, where he had ‘conversed with the Spiritual Sun’. Welsh cultural revivalists here founded their Gorsedd of the Bards, leading to the Eisteddfod movement that later moved to Wales. It has since featured in many films and in the writings of Alan Bennett, Margaret Drabble, Martin Amis and other local residents. The footpath to the top has been inscribed with a lyric by the group Blur, ‘And the view’s so nice’.

The prospect of London from the summit spans 180 degrees. To the east are the Holloway flats crowned by the campanile of the old Caledonian Road market. The turrets of St Pancras are in the middle distance, with the once prominent view of St Paul’s, notionally ‘protected’ but increasingly enveloped in high buildings. The Shard beyond looks peculiarly incongruous at this distance, seeming to dwarf even the towers of Canary Wharf.

The view south across the Thames basin is weakened by the lie of the land. The old royal suburb of Westminster was located on swampy ground next to the abbey, leading the Stuarts and Hanoverians to flee to drier Kensington and Windsor. As a result only the tops of Big Ben and Victoria Tower are visible, looking half submerged. Beyond are the heights of Sydenham and Crystal Palace, forming the southern rim of the London basin. The palace itself was moved to south London after the closure of the Great Exhibition. Its conflagration in 1936 is still recalled by elderly residents who watched from the top of Primrose Hill.

At our feet lies a restful contrast, John Nash’s Regent’s Park. Its stucco villas and terraces were originally located amid clumps of trees, such that each could believe itself alone in the country, an ideal of rus in urbe that in summer is still almost plausible. On the left of the park are the stately facades of Cumberland and Chester terraces, like palaces dropped in from St Petersburg. In the foreground on the canal bank lies the Snowdon aviary, with the Zoo’s Mappin Terraces and elephant house behind, now empty of elephants. Regent’s Park is still one of Europe’s great urban set pieces.

Primrose Hill is a place where Londoners come to watch over their capital, mingling private pains and pleasures with those of the city as a whole. There is always a knot of spectators on its summit, discussing the view as if it were a book club. I know every zigzag of these footpaths, the warmth of its summer grass, the lengthening tree shadows in autumn, the toboggan runs in winter. For me this will always be a special view.

RICHMOND HILL

The Thames towards Twickenham

The view from Richmond Hill has been lauded ever since Henry VII built a palace here in 1501, named after his seat of Richmond in Yorkshire. Under his granddaughter, Elizabeth, it became a popular resort, the tidal river being a faster and safer thoroughfare than any road. Londoners would even take trips to see the queen hold audiences on the terrace. On the hill was a beacon, recalled by Macaulay when describing the Armada signal: ‘The sentinel on Whitehall gate looked forth into the night/ And saw o’erhanging Richmond Hill that streak of blood red light.’

Greater celebrity came with the Hanoverians, yearning to escape the fog and politics of London. They brought with them poets, artists and essayists (as journalists were then called) who declared Richmond Arcadia, a landscape fit for Claude or Poussin. The Thames was London’s Tiber, its liquid history. Here the gods of the river sported with the muses, and Old Father Thames watched local maidens flirting with courtiers on the towpath.

Soon aristocrats and artists were taking houses to be near the court. Reynolds lived on the hill and Turner near by. Gainsborough and Constable came here to paint. The Virginian city of Richmond was so named because its founder, Colonel William Byrd, thought the site reminded him of home. As for the folk song ‘The Lass on Richmond Hill’, the lass herself is strongly contested between Surrey and Yorkshire.

From the Victorian period there were pleas for the view’s protection, probably the first in this book to enjoy such an accolade. The Richmond shoreline belonged to court families who had held property since the eighteenth century or before: Buccleuchs, Cardigans, Ladbrokes and Tollemaches. Conservationists fought profiteers. By the 1890s Petersham Ait, also known as Glover’s Island, was threatened with a large Pears soap advertisement, the day being saved only when a local philanthropist bought it. An act passed in 1902 specifically protected Richmond from development, though this did little to halt the battles.

The serpentine Thames: Richmond Hill by JMW Turner, 1825

The chief casualty was the old Star and Garter pub on the hilltop. It was bought as a home for disabled veterans after the First World War and ponderously rebuilt in 1924 by Sir Edwin Cooper. It was specifically located on the hill to honour the wounded with ‘the finest view in London’. The benefit to the few was thought to outweigh the offence to many.

The view from Richmond Hill today differs from its Georgian past chiefly in the growth of trees. They pleasantly conceal the spread of suburban estates over the western reaches of London, but conceal also the distant course of the river and the courtly mansions along the Twickenham shore. But the river’s curve immediately below the hill remains clear, its water reflecting the changing mood of the sky, white, blue, grey, silver and blood red at sunset.

To Hogarth, this Richmond curve perfectly evoked the S-shaped ‘line of beauty’ of the rococo, signifying liveliness and ‘calling the attention’, in contrast to ‘static and inanimate’ straight lines. To Plato such serpentine curves were ‘eternally and by their very nature beautiful, and give a pleasure of their own quite free from the itch of desire’. Here the curve is broken only by the positioning of Glover’s Island, free of hoardings but still a beauty spot on the face of the river.

On the left, Surrey, bank is Petersham Meadow, complete with ruminating cows, now under what amounts to a cow-preservation order courtesy of the National Trust. Beyond is Petersham and the seventeenth-century gem of Ham House, home of the scheming Stuart courtier the Duchess of Lauderdale. A ferry once crossed the river to Twickenham at this point.

The Middlesex bank offers glimpses of Marble Hill, built for the Countess of Suffolk, mistress of George II, with whom his dalliance appears to have comprised little more than games of cards. It borders the grounds of Orleans House, named after French aristocrats who sought fashionable refuge from revolution.

Upstream was Alexander Pope’s home and grotto, and Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. Here, wrote Pope, ‘barges as solemn as barons of the Exchequer move under my window, and Richmond Hill and Ham Walks bound my prospect’. It was, he wrote, ‘the Muses’ fav’rite seat . . . the Graces’ lov’d retreat’. His house has gone but the grotto survives. Walpole’s Strawberry Hill has been restored to its ‘Gothick’ splendour and opened to the public.

We can only imagine what Pope might have said of the towers rising over Kingston in the distance and of an office block erected in Twickenham itself, not to mention the looming bulk of the rugby ground. The Victorians fought to protect the view from Richmond Hill, and largely succeeded. We struggle to do so and fail. Yet the outlook from Richmond Hill is still mostly as painted by Turner and others. In a city of lost prospects, that surely is worth preserving.

WATERLOO BRIDGE

Towards the City of London

‘Earth has not anything to show more fair’ wrote Wordsworth of the view of London from Westminster Bridge. ‘Dull would he be of soul who could pass by/ A sight so touching in its majesty.’ Wordsworth was writing from abroad and from memory, recollecting London at dawn, ‘all bright and glittering in the smokeless air’. He was inspired by his sister Dorothy’s observation that a man-made spectacle could compete with his favoured works of nature. She was right, but Wordsworth was recalling London at dawn with its fires not lit.

Views of London from the Thames are both celebrated and vulnerable. They offer the charm of the river, variety and a rare opportunity to see the city at street level from a distance of more than a few yards. A mild curiosity of Wordsworth’s sonnet is that it tends to be illustrated by Canaletto’s view of the City of London from Somerset House. Westminster Bridge does not offer this view with St Paul’s and most of the City’s spires being invisible round the Lambeth bend. Today the Westminster view is also impeded by Hungerford Bridge. I therefore prefer the ‘Canaletto’ view of the City, from the Somerset House end of Waterloo Bridge.

Until the Second World War this view was little changed from the nineteenth century. It was a scene of riverside wharves and warehouses, with behind them the business houses of the City rising uphill. St Paul’s was dominant and some of Wren’s spires still visible. This survives along the north bank. It plays host to the dignified facade of Somerset House, its ground-floor arcades once descending into the pre-Embankment river and giving access to Admiralty barges. To its right lies the oasis of the Temple, protected enclave of the legal profession. The old City of London school then carries the eye past the former mouth of the Fleet river to the rise of Ludgate Hill and the newly roofed Blackfriars Bridge over the river.

Touching majesty: The Thames from Somerset House, Canaletto, 1746–50

St Brides to the Shard: the new London from Westminster Bridge

Here London sits on what is still recognisably a hill, but all other echoes of the past die away. The view of St Paul’s has been compromised, its portico obstructed by a glass box. The visually coherent, indeed exciting, policy of once clustering towers on the crest of the City hill has failed, as has the hope of retaining ‘sky penetration’ through the towers behind the cathedral. The bulbous Walkie-Talkie appears to have slid downhill in an effort to join its soul-mate, the adjacent Shard.

We do better to blot out comparison with Paris, Rome or Berlin and regard the new London as a place of the times, given over to raw speculative building. This is best demonstrated on the south bank from Waterloo Bridge, in the line of office and residential towers now emerging along the Southwark shore. To some, this abandonment of skyline design is visually stimulating, a symbol of a metropolis of uncompromising vitality, ready to embrace any market and go where it leads even if the result is a mess.

The scene is most exciting at night, when illumination replaces bulk and colour is reflected by water. On the north bank, lights line the Embankment and climb the City hill to where the subtle illumination of St Paul’s holds sway. Brightly lit office blocks blaze across the water, to find reflection in the garish primary colours projected onto the National Theatre, the Hayward Gallery and County Hall. Advertising was once banned along the Thames – hence the device of the Oxo Tower grilles – but is now permitted even on the National Theatre facade. The southern approach to Waterloo Bridge may yet rival Piccadilly Circus. The view is vulgar or vital according to taste.

Day or night, London from the Thames displays the visual anarchy that is the new landscape of London. I doubt if Wordsworth would cheer, but he would surely agree that ‘dull would he be of soul’ who could remain unmoved.