I have been reading the absolutely excellent and illuminating book by Amy Thomas, The City in the City: Architecture and Change in London’s Financial District, recently published and beautifully produced by MIT Press. 

It helps to explain a lot about the radical changes in the architecture of the City in recent decades: essentially since Big Bang when the City’s traditional ways of working which were were conservative, allowed time for long lunches and were based on trust were replaced by a much more aggressive, testosterone fuelled style of trading requiring the exchange of information on huge, self-contained trading floors. 

I am sure I am over-simplifying, but it obviously helps to explain the eruption of big, aggressive, free-form buildings which pay no attention to, in fact, deliberately look down on, the existing more traditional streets of the City.

There are questions, however, which are perhaps inevitably unanswered because of the timing of the book.

The first is what exactly happened – if anything – post the 2008 crash. 

The new style of buildings post-2008 is more anonymous.  The great skyscrapers are over 50 stories high and  accommodate shops and gyms within the building, so that workers never have to go out on to the street. 

But do people actually like this style of working ?  If all work can be done on a laptop, why not sit in a café or at home, rather than in an anonymous open-plan office, as people learned to do during COVID ? 

The fourth chapter ends with a question. ‘As real estate strategists and their clients begin to decrease their real estate holdings, and as desks disappear from offices and resurface in co-working hubs, cafes, snugs, and sitting rooms, the question is: What value does the City have in a digital, postpandemic (not to mention post Brexit) world ?’ (p.297)

This presumably helps to explain the current orgy of destruction and the City’s willingness to disobey its own code of practice with 75 buildings in the City currently scheduled for redevelopment.

The book shows very clearly that the culture of the City can, and has, changed very fast in the past. 

Maybe it has done so again and we are only just waking up to its consequences.