Architecture in London: cathedrals, Victorian and High-Tech

Architecture in London spans a thousand years in a few kilometres: the Gothic Westminster Abbey, Christopher Wren's Baroque St Paul's Cathedral after the Great Fire of 1666, the Neoclassical British Museum and Gothic Revival Houses of Parliament of the 19th century, and, from the 1980s, High-Tech buildings such as the Lloyd's building and 30 St Mary Axe, known as the Gherkin. The buildings follow here in chronological order, with a walk through the districts where they lie.

Facts

The Middle Ages and Wren

The oldest buildings are on the banks of the Thames. From the 1070s William the Conqueror had the White Tower built in the Tower of London, a Romanesque stone fortress that is today a World Heritage Site. In Westminster, Westminster Hall, the great hall of the medieval royal palace, survived the fire of 1834, and its oak hammerbeam roof from the 1390s is one of the largest timber roofs of the Middle Ages.

Westminster Abbey was rebuilt in the Gothic style from 1245 under Henry III, with French cathedrals as the model. English monarchs have been crowned here since 1066, and the church is full of tombs and monuments. The west towers were added only in the 18th century to designs by Nicholas Hawksmoor, in a Gothic that was already a deliberate borrowing.

The Great Fire of 1666 destroyed most of the City. Christopher Wren, who was an astronomer before he became an architect, designed the new St Paul's Cathedral, built in 1675–1710, and some fifty new parish churches whose spires are still visible between the office blocks. The dome of St Paul's is really three: an inner dome seen from the interior, a cone of brick that carries the lantern and an outer dome of timber and lead that shapes the skyline. The background can be found in the guide to Baroque architecture.

Georgian and Neoclassical

In the 18th and early 19th centuries London expanded with uniform terraced houses around planted squares, the Georgian squares that still characterise Bloomsbury and Mayfair. In the 1820s John Nash designed the white-rendered terraces around Regent's Park, which with their columns and pediments look like palaces. The architect John Soane made his own house at Lincoln's Inn Fields into a museum filled with ancient fragments, plaster casts and cleverly placed light. Sir John Soane's Museum is preserved as he left it and is one of the city's most surprising buildings.

The British Museum, built in 1823–1852 to designs by Robert Smirke, has a long Ionic colonnade on a Greek model. It also holds the Parthenon sculptures from the Acropolis. In 2000 the inner courtyard was given a glass roof by Foster + Partners, an example of how contemporary architecture can transform a historic building.

Victorian London

When the old Houses of Parliament burned down in 1834, the Palace of Westminster was rebuilt in the Gothic Revival style by Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin, 1840–1870. The clock tower with Big Ben was completed in 1859. The choice of Gothic was meant to show that British democracy had medieval roots; the difference from the genuine Gothic of Westminster Abbey on the other side of the street is explained in the guide to Gothic and Gothic Revival.

St Pancras, built in 1866–1876, shows Victorian engineering and historicism side by side: in front of William Henry Barlow's enormous train shed of iron and glass, George Gilbert Scott designed a Gothic Revival hotel in red brick. The station was restored and in 2007 became the terminus for the trains through the Channel Tunnel. From the same period is the Crystal Palace, Joseph Paxton's glass hall for the Great Exhibition of 1851, which was moved to Sydenham and burned down in 1936.

Post-war, Postmodernism and High-Tech

The bombing of the Second World War left large empty areas in the City. On one of them the Barbican Estate was built, 1965–1982, a residential area with three tall towers, terraces, lakes and an arts centre in raw concrete; see the guide to Brutalism. Postmodernism is visible in the Sainsbury Wing at the National Gallery by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, 1991, and in James Stirling's striped office building No 1 Poultry from 1997.

London became the capital of High-Tech. Richard Rogers's Lloyd's building, completed in 1986, has stairs, lifts and pipes on the outside, so that the great hall of the insurance market inside could be entirely open. Norman Foster designed 30 St Mary Axe, completed in 2003, a tapering glass cylinder that the city's inhabitants quickly named after the gherkin. Across the Thames lies Tate Modern, which Herzog & de Meuron made out of a disused power station and which opened in 2000. South of the river, since 2012, rises Renzo Piano's glass pyramid The Shard, at just over 300 metres the tallest building in the United Kingdom. Read more in the guide to High-Tech architecture.

The walk

Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster lie opposite one another on the Thames, and the Sainsbury Wing a short walk north at Trafalgar Square. In Bloomsbury lies the British Museum, and St Pancras is a short Tube ride further north. Soane's museum lies at Lincoln's Inn Fields in Holborn.

In the City, St Paul's, No 1 Poultry, Lloyd's and 30 St Mary Axe are within walking distance, with the Barbican to the north. From St Paul's the Millennium Bridge, a footbridge from 2000, crosses the river to Tate Modern. All the buildings can be found on the map, and the British timeline in architectural history shows how they fit together.

Not to be missed

Exercise

Who designed St Paul's Cathedral after the fire of 1666?