Little London

The New London Model at the London Building Centre, officially launched last week, is quite something.  Covering 85 square kilometres at 1:2000 scale, it incorporates 3-D-printed models of an amazing 170,000 buildings. That's every single office building, block of flats and even individual house from White City in the west to the Royal Docks in the east. 

The experience of visiting it is, as you might imagine, akin to looking out the window of a plane when flying over the city on the approach to Heathrow, but with the added bonus of being able to stop and peer over for a closer look so that you really can actually see your house down there. Gratifyingly, I was, indeed, able to spot my home of 3 years' back in Bromley-by-Bow, an unassuming ex-council maisonette, or, at least, the block it was in:

Whilst the model itself is unquestionably a great achievement and definitely worth seeing, I'm rather more equivocal about the healthiness of the perspective that it puts the viewer in.  

At this scale, the eye bounds over so many hectares of low and medium-rise neighbourhoods and is drawn, instead, inexorably, to the great high-rises clustered around the City of London and Canary Wharf, plus the unmissable Shard.  

As precise as the models are, for any building smaller than skyscraper-sized, you are really just getting a place-marker for size and basic layout. The particularities of structural form, let alone architectural detail, fail to show up.  It is not even possible to tell the difference between office and residential block without the clues provided in real life by surface texture; everything here is rendered in white or grey (depending on its state/date of construction), thus you can't even tell from the models what is glazed and what is masonry wall.

This means the small scale is more-or-less unintelligible, and hence boring. From such a vantage, the only structures that truly hold any interest are the really big ones - the Shards, Walkie Talks, Cheesegraters and so on - the only ones whose forms are actually legible.  The result is that one is encouraged - and this is the rhetorical undercurrent here, not necessarily an intentional one (although it is noteworthy that the model was sponsored by a host of major developers such as Westfield, Barratt and Land Securities) - to wish that far more of the city could be populated with those more lively looking large creatures, at the expense of the tedious moss-like carpet that covers most of the surface area at present.  

In other words, boo low-rise and hooray super-tall!

This insidious rhetorical slant is all the more apparent when you ask yourself, afterwards, the slightly counter-intuitive question: what was I *not* drawn to when I looked at it? When I now think about it whilst I spent much time skyscraper-spotting many of London's most attractive and lively locales failed to register completely: Soho, Bloomsbury, Covent Garden, Notting Hill, Borough Market, Camden... They were there, but I don't recall my attention being directed to them.

Not represented in a 1:2000 model: the spirit of
Camden Market (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Camden_Market#/media/
File:Camden_lock_market.JPG)

Nothing about what make these places - London's famous "villages" - so special is captured at this scale. All of the buildings that comprise these places are there, for sure, precisely replicated in the model, but their essence, feel and even purpose isn't present at all.  Accordingly, they demand neither your attention nor your respect. 

There is something almost Orwellian about this: the means by which an idea is represented has succeeded in virtually annihilating the idea from all contemplation.

Put it this way, if I were an evil urban planner, trying to promote some scheme to demolish Soho to make way for office blocks (something that was once on the cards), or to knock down Camden Market to make way for a bland shopping mall (which has partly happened), or tear through swathes of inner London for some nightmarish modern version of the London Motorway Box, this is where I'd want to hold the public inquiry.  A place where one is reminded of the immediate visual excitement of a super-tall, but one in which the sights and sounds and smells of a busy London open-air market, or the understated elegance of a London terrace, are conveniently hidden away in plain sight.  

Sure, it is nice to be reminded how London fits together in the sense of appreciating the "proximity of Stratford to the City and the West End", as the model's promoters, the New London Architecture forum, point out, thought-provoking to be confronted with the scale of human intervention on such a large area of land represented in three-dimensional exactitude, and cool to marvel at the dedication of the model makers.  

But just remember that, like all models - be they economic, philosophical or, as here, physical - the New London Model has its own set of underlying assumptions about what is and isn't important, and it necessarily leaves a lot out.  

The London Building Centre is located on Store Street, WC1E 7BT, nearest tube Goodge Street.  See their website for visiting information.  It is free entry to the exhibition.