After the Twin Towers I thought that no-one would want to build any very tall buildings for a long time. But there are more going up in London now than ever before. I was wrong. Why? No other reason that we have a left-wing mayor. All progress in architecture in the UK has been a debate on the Left.
Tall - arbitrarily defined as over 100m - buildings in London were almost all built between 1959 and 1974 (although the oldest of them is Victorian. After Guy's Hospital, and the Trellick Tower, and its slightly smaller relation in the East End, in IIRC 1974 the only 2 buildings over 100m were the Natwest building and Canary Wharf.
Guy's, the tallest habitable building in the UK when it was built, (Post Office Tower is a radio mast & no more to be counted than Crystal Palace or the spire of Old St. Paul's) was still the 3rd tallest in 2000. It is now 5th, about to be 6th, and if buildings for which consent has been given are completed it will soon be 8th.
These big buildings are records of the way the future was.
Millbank is smooth & slick & corporate, the last echoes of a dying International Style. The same goes for Euston Tower & to a lesser extent Central Point. They make you think of films in which Boeing 707s take off in the sunlight behind the opening credits, and IBM computers that used punched cards, and men in dark suits and white shirts. The sort of thing that Rock & Roll was rebelling against.
PO tower is all high-tech & futuristic in a way that now looks old. It goes along with early Dr Who episodes and James Bond gadgets and Concorde.
The Trellick Tower, and Guy's Hospital are in-your-face textured concrete brutalism with antennae sticking out. Guys is the Millwall of big buildings, "We are Brutalist, no-one likes us and we don't care!; the Trellick is the only block of council flats I know about that has had an sf novel written about it. Slightly more restrained - and so even uglier because less weird - are the immense tiers of slab-block council estates in South London. Prisons for the exiled poor, who can look down from afar on the little terraced houses they used to live in, now occupied by the rich who paid what to the previous inhabitants might have been a lifetime's income for the privilege. Concrete and pharmaceuticals. The future for people who read Ballard and Moorcock. The Barbican is the same sort of thing for posh people and pretending to be neo-Gothic. Brutalism doesn't work when it pretends.
Canary Wharf is something older and more paternalistic than that. Built as a fortress to keep the East End out, a sort of mid-western business enclave in what we used to call the Third World come home to Britain when the Empire struck back, a concrete cathedral to worship the Almighty Market, a gated community for geriatric corporations, Niven and Pournelle's Todos Santos come down to the Isle of Dogs and pupped, gathered round a vast lonely monolith that impressed because it was a vast lonely monolith - and is far less wonderful now it has companions, the lesser buildings fundamentally boring, steel barns for back-office operations, but faced in a 1930s style that is not so much Classical as Archaic, with whiffs of Babylon and dead Pharaohs. Autocracy drools. Of course it was obsolete before the tenants even moved in.
The New Labour Dome, post-modernist excess on the outside, the biggest tent in the world. Gloriously nothing else but the biggest tent in the world, bright and shiny white fabric , stretched over brightly painted steel, like a washing-powder-ad of the apocalypse, presiding over its new tent city, hectares of pavilions and booths and marquees. But inside? If you build it they will come! And what came? A 3rd-rate jumble of exhibitions by numbers, a trailer-park of 3d adverts, a public-private partnership between the bland and safe, clean, on-message, railtracked to McDonalds and back.
And now what do we get? The Glass Gherkin is going up, New City Hall is occupied, all over the City and South Bank architects are putting hats and bellies on buildings. Straight lines and flat surfaces organised into curves. Pregnant buildings?
On a smaller scale there is the little post-modernist enclave growing in Peckham - famously the library and new sports-hall, making 3 sides of a square with a totally useless arch that leads nowhere (I love it). If this was 15 years ago they'd rename the place Damilola Taylor Square, but as it is it is just plain Peckham Square. But also other buildings - a late-modern house somewhere near Asylum Road complementing the few genuine modern houses on the other side of the main road up to the modern St, Mary's Church, a completely out of character Burger King in the High Street with glass sides and a blue wave roof, like something out of early 70s California. Peckham as the new Camden? You heard it here first.
Planning permission for big buildings in cities in the UK almost only happens when there is a Labour government. Say what you like about the Labour Party, they do let people build big fuck-off buildings. Maybe that's why so many of those high-tech monumental architects are Labour supporters (though way back when Goldfinger & Lubetkin were both well to the left of Labour).
Of course the conservation and preservation movements in England were also started by lefties as well, but of another sort. Ruskin or Morris (famous sf-writer and revolutionary) wouldn't have touched New Labour with a bargepole. The same goes for those pushing for human-scale buildings, appropriate technology, sustainable development, and livable cities.
All progress in architecture in the UK has been a debate on the Left.
The Tories just build mock-Tudor suburban semis for themselves, rabbit-hutch flats for the poor, hectare-hugging shed supermarkets (or at best tedious neo-vernacular brick ones) with oversized carparks, and boring 10-story office buildings that look like they would have been up to date in small mid-western city a generation ago. If you want interesting buildings, vote Labour.