Reflections on London

London has always been of interest to me for as long as I can remember, whether is is through seeing views of London on the television, in picture postcards brought back by friends who have visited, or the memorabilia that is associated with the nation's capital, the red Routemaster bus, the black cab or the Underground. London seems to be a city that has in a sense eluded me, in terms in a number circumstances I have tried to move to London to live and work, but for one reason or another has not happened to date.

Over the time span of 25 years there have been many opportunities to visit, and in a sense there is always something new, something exciting happening in the constant tide of change, that is transforming the city. Massive infrastructure projects that are far greater than London itself, when I first visited the capital for the purposes of the story in 1989, the Channel Tunnel did not yet exist, although it was work in progress, the first phase of Docklands Light Railway had only just opened, Heathrow Terminal 5 was still in the design stages if it existed as a concept at all, and who ever heard of Crossrail? Events that seemed a distant future concept from life in the deprived city of the late 1980's in Thatcher's Britain, the Millennium Celebrations, the 2012 Olympics have been and gone, facilitated by some pretty dramatic changes to the City, the Jubilee Line, Eurostar and much later HS1 that completed the link to Europe, the regeneration of the Docklands, the dramatic transformation of the Greenwich Peninsula and what became the Olympic Park in Stratford that are still driving regeneration of the East end of London.

Projects have been undertaken and delivered, each with their own story to tell, some more controversial than others: Waterloo International, The Millennium Dome, The Millennium Footbridge, The Olympic Stadium, St Pancras International, The Shard, The Emirates Air Line to name a few, that have each played their part in cementing London's position as a global capital, signifying the constant change and growth of a living city. Social, political and cultural forces generate the need for change, and countless professionals are involved in the delivery of a built product that the public interacts with, experiences and forms opinions about. There are probably countless professionals that will disagree with me but there is only one profession that can comprehend the social, political and cultural forces into a set of requirements that form the program for what is built and that profession is architecture.

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