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"It is the disaster of London, as to the beauty of its figure that it is stretched out in buildings, just at the pleasure of every builder, or undertaker of buildings, and as the convenience of people directs, whether for trade or other wise; and this has spread the face of it in the most straggling, confused manner, out of all shape, uncompact, and unequal."

Defoe in particular must have sorely regretted the fact that post-Fire opportunities were not taken.

London has always been an exception to the European city model; it will probably always be a muddle. Yes there have been times when it could have been sorted out, but overall projects for its great articulation were piecemeal. There are, in London, glimpses of great set pieces: Greenwich, The Mall, Regent Street, Regent's Park; but they never were properly articulated into the rest of the urban fabric, (let alone to one another). Grandiose plans for the greater coherence of London there were particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century: George Dance's Double London Bridge, Thomas Allom's Thames Embankment, Major-General Sir Frederick Trench's two mile riverside Colonnade, Soane's Processional Route. All in vain.

(I think especially of a soul mate, Sir John Soane, who, hapless man, in 1826, in London, produced a Design for a "Grand National Entrance into the Metropolis"! Never built of course; doomed! doomed in each and every word in this project: Grand? OK. Occasionally we can do Grand; but by and large that has never been the way that London has been conceived. National? London has never been a National city, not anyway as Paris has been. Entrance? can here be an entrance to as amorphous and struggling a mass as London? London Bridge could perhaps be seen as an "entrance" to London for the traffic from the south and the continent. An entrance into the Metropolis? rather a courtyard of an inn off the Borough High Street where practically all coaches from Dover and the continent fetched up. As for the last word of Soane's hopeful project: Metropolis? forget it! Metropolis it was, and how; but it was rarely conceived with such admirable abstraction.)

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