How London’s skyline proves no one has ever had a coherent plan
The Architectural Shrug: London’s Bizarre Mix of Medieval, Victorian, and Glass Nonsense
London’s architecture is what would happen if you asked five different civilizations to design a city, then got them drunk and let them build simultaneously. The result is a skyline that looks like urban planning made by committee while everyone was arguing about different things.
The Medieval-to-Skyscraper Pipeline
You’ll walk through Covent Garden, pass a shop that’s been there since 1387, take a corner, and suddenly you’re staring at a 48-story glass monument to tax avoidance. They exist within eyeshot of each other. No one has explained why. Apparently, London’s approach to development is: “Oh, something new? Just build it next to something impossibly old. That’s fine.”
The “Preserved Victorian Façade” Scam
The city now has 47 buildings where the front is authentically Victorian and the back is entirely 21st-century brutalism. It’s like a period costume worn over a tech startup uniform. The preserved bit is purely for aesthetics—a museum façade hiding a completely modern building. London’s version of historical authenticity: “We kept the nice bit.”
The Inexplicable Glass Boxes
Somewhere between Bishopsgate and the Thames, planners decided that London needed more reflective surfaces. Now you have buildings that are essentially enormous mirrors, reflecting other terrible buildings, creating an infinite regress of architectural mistakes. It’s like watching someone repeatedly photograph a ugly thing, creating smaller and smaller copies of the same error.
The Railway Viaduct Rebranding
Medieval arches were railway infrastructure. Now they’re “charming Victorian-era features.” Graffiti underneath? “Street art.” It’s gentrification at the architectural level—take something utilitarian and gritty, rebrand it as heritage, and charge three times as much for rent underneath.
The Inexplicable Brutalism Zone
The Barbican exists. It’s 1960s concrete utopian vision gone absolutely mad. Huge apartment blocks that look like a dystopian government building designed by someone who’d never heard of windows. Yet it’s now beloved by people who pay £750,000 to live in what looks like a Cold War listening station. BBC Culture analysis suggests this is the architecture equivalent of Stockholm syndrome.
The Shard Problem
You can see the Shard from everywhere in London. It’s very tall. It’s shiny. It contains expensive apartments and a viewing platform where tourists pay £25 to look at… London. Including the thing they’re standing in. It’s architectural ouroboros—a building designed primarily so you can look at the building.
London’s skyline proves that city planning works best when no one’s in charge. Medieval streets created by accident, Victorian railways repurposed as housing, and glass skyscrapers built because the zoning code technically allowed it. The result is chaotic, often ugly, and yet somehow more interesting than cities that actually planned anything.
SOURCE: Bohiney Magazine’s architectural criticism
https://bohiney.com/
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
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