architecture

western pumping station pimlico

Victoria’s Campanile – the Western Pumping Station

03/12/2023 donbrown 0

As one rattles across the Thames in to Victoria station an elegant building appears on the Chelsea Embankment on one’s left. It’s a building on […]

Albert Bridge: “A temporary gangway flung across the river”

21/10/2023 donbrown 0

One of my all time great London moments was a late summer evening about 30 years ago when I was walking home from a meeting […]

The Blue Bridge in St James’s Park

03/10/2023 donbrown 0

It’s the platform for a trillion photos – to the west is Buckingham Palace, framed by trees, and look east to see Horseguards, the London […]

Prince Albert’s Mega-kitsch Memorial

06/09/2023 donbrown 0

Of course the damn thing is utterly absurd. Every criticism of high victoriana – over-sentimental, over-decorated, over-elaborate to the point of fussy, over size – […]

St George’s Bloomsbury: the triumph of “the Devil’s Architect”

28/08/2023 donbrown 0

Find your way to the High Holborn entrance to the roof terrace of the new ‘Post Building’ (the former Royal Mail West Central District Office), […]

St Mary’s Isn’t in the Way

15/08/2023 donbrown 0

One of the ways in which the city has been vastly improved over the past few years has been the claiming back of roadways into […]

Duck Island Cottage – Westminster’s Swiss Chalet

15/05/2023 donbrown 0

It’s somehow absolutely typical of london that some of the closest neighbours to George Gilbert Scott’s huge Italianate Foreign Office building is a pair of […]

Whitehall Court – London on the Loire

11/05/2023 donbrown 0

Look towards the Eye from St James’s Park (or vice versa), or look upriver from the Golden Jubilee Bridge and there appears to be a […]

The York House Watergate and the 1st Duke of Buckingham

12/02/2023 donbrown 0

When Joseph Bazalgette created his marvellous (and still used) sewer system the 1860s, he pushed back the banks of the Thames and buried his main […]

Queen Anne’s Gate: Higgledy-Piggledy in SW1

29/08/2022 donbrown 0

Apparently the expression “higgledy-piggledy” is not much known in the US; my use of the phrase to an American tour group as we passed a […]