Ancient and medieval London
Parts of the fortified walls of Roman Londinium can still be seen, notably at the Tower Hill tube exit. The Guildhall Art Gallery, in the heart of the City, houses the remains of the city's amphitheatre. But the most impressive remains are those of the Temple of Mithras at the eastern end of Queen Victoria Street. Traces of the Saxon presence can also be seen: in the Saxon church of All-Hallows-by-the-Tower, the oldest in the city, you can admire the crypt with its Roman paving dating from the 2nd century, as well as the arch covered with ceramic tiles. It is a fine example of architectural syncretism.
In the 11th century, William the Conqueror had a line of defensive fortresses built on top of the original Roman enclosure. The first major military structure was the White Tower, built of Caen stone. Its massive, squat appearance is due to its walls, which are over 3 m thick! London also boasts some masterpieces of Norman religious architecture, such as St. Bartholomew-the-Great Church, with its massive columns and round arches. In the Middle Ages, London's city walls were home to over a hundred religious buildings. Among them, one stands out for its astonishing shape: the Temple Church and its circular plan. Its crenellated exterior and slender vault above the chancel make it a fine example of the Romanesque-Gothic style. On the civil front, it was during this period that the City's merchants financed the construction of their Guildhall or town hall. Finally, the mythical Tower of London is reinforced by numerous additions and impresses with its high walls and low arches.
Splendors of the Tudors
Quickly realizing that architecture is both a symbol and a vector of power, the Tudors embarked on major building projects. The finest example is the chapel at Westminster Abbey, with its impressive Perpendicular Gothic style, so named because of its emphasis on vertical lines. In particular, its fan-shaped vaults and wide openings lend lightness and luminosity to the whole. Buildings are generally taller, and houses are adorned with precious details such as ornamental half-timbering, enfilade windows and corbelled balconies. Lincoln's Inn Old Hall and the Staple Inn residential complex are two fine examples. The Tudors also built imposing palaces, often based on confiscated ecclesiastical residences that they enlarged. Such was the case at Hampton Court, which Henry VIII took over from Cardinal Wolsey. He added the Great Hall and the Royal Chapel. He also equipped the palace with kitchens and transformed the park into a hunting reserve. While the living conditions of the sovereigns continued to improve, those of Londoners only got worse. They crowded into insalubrious housing, threatened by epidemics and fires. To curb the situation, a royal edict was issued in 1580 banning all new construction.
Architecture in the time of the Stuarts and the Hanover
In the first half of the 17th century, under the impetus of Inigo Jones, considered the father of English architecture, the city was inspired by Antiquity and adorned with buildings in the Palladian style (in reference to Andrea Palladio, initiator of the Italian Renaissance), where coherence and harmony take precedence. Palladian facades are sober, symmetrical and punctuated by tall windows, columns and arches topped by balustrades or cornices. The Banqueting House and the Queen's Chapel are perfect examples. Inigo Jones was also an urban planner, and one of the first to think of the city as a whole, attempting to create a coherent whole. One of his attempts can be admired in the Covent Garden Piazza. Lined with arcades, themselves surmounted by elegant classical buildings with uniform facades, and the starting point for new streets opening up new perspectives, it is the forerunner of the square or residential square.
In 1666, a terrible fire ravaged the town. In 1667, the Building Act was promulgated, prohibiting the use of wood for load-bearing walls and redefining the dimensions of buildings and streets to ensure safe construction and control urbanization. The great architect of this reconstruction was Christopher Wren. Also an astronomer and mathematician, he was interested in the relationship between mass and space, and proposed a style characterized by majesty and profusion of decoration. St. Paul's Cathedral is his work. An architectural gem, this astonishing edifice blends influences from French Classical, Italian Baroque, English Gothic and even Byzantine with its domes covering the nave. Wren's art lies in his ability to harmonize the whole, erasing all its disparities. He also drew up plans for over 50 churches, 23 of which can still be seen today. The city's skyline saw steeples with spires replace the massive square medieval towers.
The 18th century was marked by a neoclassical style, alternating between neo-Palladian and neo-Greek styles. Among the great achievements Christ Church by Nicholas Hawksmoor and above all Chiswick House by Lord Burlington and William Kent, directly inspired by the great rural villas of Rome. Also of note are Robert Adam's superb Syon Park Estate and Osterley Park Estate. This was also the period that saw the development of Terraced Houses, rows of semi-detached houses that give unity to the town's streets. These sober 4-storey buildings are distinguished by their flight of steps leading up to the porch.
Regency Style
In the early 19th century, the downtown area was transformed under the impetus of architect and urban planner John Nash, who advocated a free, imaginative style of architecture in which the overall effect took precedence. It was to him that we owe the advent of the Regency style (created under the reign of the Prince Regent). The buildings, all in shiny white stucco, are aligned in a highly stylized, even theatrical manner. At the Prince Regent's request, Nash also redesigned the city center, imagining a way to link Piccadilly to north Oxford Street. Regent's Street became the backbone of the city. From this astonishing urban planning project, we can still admire the Crescent, those superb circus-like curves bordered by elegant colonnades. Curves are one of the hallmarks of John Nash's work, particularly in his road designs. But Nash didn't limit his designs to this main artery: he also imagined the legendary Trafalgar Square and the superb Regent's Park, with its Corinthian columns and triumphal arches.
Under the reign of Victoria and Edward VIII
The country was entering an era of exceptional economic and industrial prosperity. The architecture of its capital must reflect this power. This led to a style that borrowed from past eras and used modern techniques and materials. Victorian eclecticism took an interest in Romanesque, Norman and, above all, Gothic architecture. Tinged with modernity, the latter became Victorian High Gothic, marked by the use of red brick. In 1834, most of the Houses of Parliament were destroyed by fire. The Crown launched a major competition to renovate them... but the competition stipulated that only Gothic or Elizabethan styles could be used. Charles Barry won the competition with an astonishing neo-Gothic design. To balance the horizontality of the building, he added three towers of different shapes and sizes, including the famous clock tower, with its miniature flying buttresses, stained glass windows and gargoyles. This interplay between horizontality and verticality gives the building a surprisingly harmonious appearance. The Royal Courts of Justice on George Edmund Street are also superb examples of this neo-Gothic style. The 19th century also saw the continuation of the town planning model of the garden square. One of the great masters of the genre was the developer Thomas Cubitt, whose work includes Belgrave Square. He also developed the very first modern construction company, bringing all trades under one roof to save time and money, perfecting sewage systems and increasing the number of green spaces.
Queen Victoria also endowed the city with majestic educational buildings, starting with Kew Gardens, magnificent botanical gardens whose impressive greenhouse can still be admired today. In 1851, London was alive with the excitement of the Universal Exhibition. For the occasion, Joseph Paxton unveiled his Crystal Palace. Comprising a hall 600 m long, 120 m wide and 34 m high, this palace of modernity is impressive. It is also the very first building to feature standardized, prefabricated elements. Although it was demolished in 1936, this palace of glass and steel remains an architectural model to this day. It was also during this period that George Gilbert Scott drew up plans for the future St Pancras railroad station.
The Edwardian period, meanwhile, was characterized by an excessive sense of scale and detail. The great achievements of the period are Aston Webb's Admiralty Arch, with its colossal Corinthian columns, and Reginald Blomfield's The Quadrant, with its curvilinear buildings and neo-Baroque facades.
Modernism and reconstruction
At the end of the 19th century, the Arts and Crafts movement, launched by designer William Morris and architect Philip Webb, advocated a return to traditional craftsmanship and quality tailoring. In architectural terms, the emphasis was on simplicity and modern comfort. The Red House in East London, for example, was the movement's laboratory for innovation. Note its blend of local and Gothic styles, with its tiled roof and pointed arches.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the city added a number of striking modernist buildings, such as the Michelin Building. A true advertising building, its details emphasize the brand, like the bosses reminiscent of tire treads or the friezes inscribed with the Michelin name. In the inter-war years, other astonishing buildings came into being: Adelaide House, the tallest office building at the time, with its façade combining minimalism and Egyptian motifs (archaeology was very much in vogue at the time!); Piccadilly Circus subway station, with its rotunda of over 50 columns arranged in concentric circles supporting the traffic circle; or the Daily Express Building, the country's first glass curtain, with its Jazz Deco style lobby.
At the end of the Second World War, the city was largely destroyed by bombing. It had to be rebuilt. The result was austere buildings, all in raw concrete... the advent of Brutalism. Visit Barbican Centre is perhaps its most famous representative. This city-within-a-city, inspired by Le Corbusier's residential urbanism, features three triangular towers that were the tallest in Europe at the time. Another symbol of this style is the Royal Festival Hall, built for the 1951 Festival of Britain. It is based on Le Corbusier's 5 points of nouvelle architecture: pilotis, free plan, facade free of load-bearing walls, entablature windows and roof forming a5th facade. It also saw the appearance of the first tall towers, with Centre Point and its 121 m tower, and the 190 m-high GPO Tower.
Postmodernism and the architecture of tomorrow
From the 1970s onwards, the city experienced a new architectural revolution, with the emergence of a high-tech style linked to the development of new engineering techniques. The most famous representative of this trend is Richard Rogers, with his legendary Lloyd's of Londonlargely inspired by Paxton's Crystal Palace. Here, Rogers promises more than architecture, he promises a strategy that begins with the outsourcing of technical elements to gain interior space. In the 90s, he was also responsible for the Millennium Dome, with its light, modular structure. From the 80s onwards, the city undertook the complete renovation of the Docklands. This vast architectural and urban planning project included the construction of the Canary Wharf business district, whose landmark is César Pelli's 244 m-high One Canada Square. At the turn of the 2000s, Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron were awarded the Pritzker Prize for their work on the Tate Modern which they installed in the Bankside Power Station. Another landmark achievement of the period was the Millennium Bridge by Norman Foster and Anthony Caro, the first bridge over the Thames in the city center since Tower Bridge in 1894. In 2002, Norman Foster gave the city its brand-new City Hall with an elegant oval structure and highly technical systems for exposure to wind and sun, and savings in materials. A concern for the environment that can also be found at 30 St Mary Axe... the address of the now legendary Gherkin, the pickle!
Faced with the proliferation of high-rise buildings, the municipality was forced to legislate and create view corridors to preserve the integrity of the silhouette of the main monuments. But in 2012, Unesco deemed the measure insufficient and threatened to put Parliament and the Tower of London on the endangered list... a scandal in Her Majesty's land! In the same year, the organization of the Olympic Games gave new impetus to contemporary architecture with the development of Olympic Park, home to Zaha Hadid's London Aquatic Centre, a superb curvilinear building with an elegant blend of steel, concrete and wood, and the incredible Arcelor Mittal Orbit Tower by Anish Kapoor. In the 2010s, the race was on for verticality, and the London skyline was transformed by iconic towers such as Renzo Piano's Leadenhall Building (the cheese grater), The Shard (the shard), Jean Nouvel's One New Change (the stealth bomber), Strata SE1 (the razor with its three wind turbines) and 20 Fenchurch Street (the walkie-talkie). Between now and 2025, the skyline is set to be transformed even further, with the construction of the 235 m Spire Tower, one of the world's tallest residential towers, and the 1 Undershaft, nicknamed the Trellis because of the strange cladding covering its 305 m length.
But the city is also banking on its existing heritage, launching major urban renewal projects such as around the Battersea power station. Listed as an historic monument, the power station is being transformed under the pencil strokes of Norman Foster and Frank Gehry, among others. A new district, Nine Elms, is springing up around the power station, with an 866-unit apartment complex and even a new American embassy. In addition, two new subway stations - Nine Elms and Battersea Power Station - were inaugurated with great fanfare in September 2021. London has certainly not finished changing its face!
