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London looked as it did after the Fire and looks as it does now for the same reason. It had its own planning principles, just as Rome and Paris had: its principle was no-principle, pure laissez faire, the great engine of the city got up and running again as soon as possible with understandable disregard for fancy plans influenced by … wossname…?..Italian geezer… Bernini.

It has always been like this; the planning of London has always been piecemeal, underfunded, tentative; its hopeful suggestions tossed aside by "the monstrous town" (Defoe) going its own way. As a result London is the most astonishing mess, a real palimpsest, layer on layer of successive building, demolition, destruction. The face of London is breathtaking in its complexity, in its astonishing juxtapositions, in the way that its muddle of medieval lanes still (in 2003) shows through. The ignominious (but therefore quite chic!) address of the new building by James Stirling, recently completed as a result of promotion from Palumbo is: I, Poultry. Foster's Swiss Re Tower? 30, St Mary's Axe. We should, of course, like that!

Studying nineteenth century pictures of Trafalgar Square I have always been interested to see, in a building abutting the Elizabethan Northumberland House, the premises of Cole's Truss and Rheumatic Belt Depot and Manufactory. I found it hard to believe in the prominence of something so prosaic, so low. I was interested later to find that Matthew Arnold himself had also commented on its anomalous position. But the truss depot is typical. London, city without shame, lacking all compunctions, unchallenged (save by a coterie of design aesthetes) by any doubts as to what should be juxtaposed with what. And it was always so.

In the sixteenth century Stow grumbles:
"...this common field....encroached upon by building of filthy cottages (notwithstanding all proclamations and acts of parliament made to the contrary..."

In 1734 London is described as "a babel...a Hotch-potch of half-moon and serpentine narrow Streets, close, dismal, long lanes, stinking Allies, dark gloomy Courts and suffocating Yards....here lives a personage of high Distinction; next Door a Butcher with his stinking Shambles"

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