How London Was Built and Changed Over Time

London was never planned, and every attempt to plan it has failed, which is why it looks the way it does.

The refused grid

After the fire of 1666, Wren, Evelyn and others submitted plans for a rebuilt city of boulevards and squares. All were rejected, because property owners wanted their own plots back and rebuilding had to start immediately. The medieval street pattern was therefore preserved in a city rebuilt in brick and stone — which is why the City still has lanes and courts in the middle of the financial district.

The Georgian estates

From the eighteenth century, aristocratic landowners developed their holdings as planned estates of terraced houses around garden squares on long leases — Bloomsbury, Mayfair, Belgravia. The terrace with its area railings, stucco ground floor and diminishing window heights is the London house, and the leasehold system it created still governs much of the city’s property.

Victorian expansion

Railways and then the Underground pushed the city outward, producing mile upon mile of bylaw terraces in yellow London stock brick and then the interwar semi-detached suburbs at the end of the lines — Metroland.

Postwar

Bomb damage and slum clearance produced council estates, some of them, like the Barbican, now listed and desirable.

Brick and stucco

The materials are as characteristic as the plans. Yellow London stock brick, made from local clay mixed with ash, darkens with soot and gives the older terraces their colour; the white stucco of Belgravia and Notting Hill is render scored to imitate stone, painted on a repainting cycle written into the leases. Both were cheap substitutes that became the look of the city.

The towers

Height was restricted by protected sightlines to Saint Paul’s until the 1990s, which is why the City’s cluster is recent, oddly shaped and nicknamed rather than numbered.