Spectacular buildings for a beautiful city

London is becoming very smug about its diversity, writes Maxwell Hutchinson, but with buildings like these it can get away with it

Spectacular Vernacular: London’s One Hundred Most Spectacular Buildings by David Long.Sutton Publishing, £19.99order this book

LONDON is a diverse city – discuss. Well, it is so bewilderingly diverse that it is in danger of becoming intolerably smug about it all.
There is a deluge of complacency about tolerance and choice, everything from ethnic, racial, and religious integration to world music, challenging art, and enough choice in food to turn your stomach.
Yes, and stop going on about it; London is the most diverse and tolerant city in the world. David Long, in his admirably structured and coherent book, draws our attention to the natural and uncontrived diversity in London’s architecture and buildings.
I take issue with Mr Long’s title in that the majority of what he sees as fascinating, quirky and humorous buildings are anything other than vernacular – that is to say, they express the natural architectural language of London which is, if anything, sober, conformist and uniform.
The buildings he has chosen and discussed, in a thankfully succinct manner, are the antithesis of the elegant and understated London of Georgian and Regency squares, and disarmingly repetitive rows of Victorian and Edwardian middle-class and artisan houses and cottages.
In the main London is a wallpaper of architectural conformity which, for most of us, is as reassuring as the cut of a good Savile Row suit and the predictability of potted Morecambe Bay shrimps at the Athenaeum.
I can detect no consistent thesis in Mr Long’s work. It is the better for that as his choice of strange and quirky buildings is as good as anybody else’s. There was a regrettable degree of initial satisfaction in the Hutchinson department when I realised that I had visited, written or broadcasted about the vast majority of the buildings over the last ten years.
Despite the fact that I question Mr Long’s thesis, it is marvellously reassuring to see how diverse (there I go again) London architecture has become.
The regally inspired style wars of the mid ’80s and early ’90s where the monarch-to-be’s choice of a return to a bygone era of classicism and genuine English vernacular was pitted against the tail-end of weary post-modernism and the emerging iPod architectural generation, has thankfully embraced everything from the Wellington Arch at Hyde Park Corner to the Neasden Hindu Temple, Norman Foster’s gherkin and the Post Office Tower.
You do not need a degree in architectural history or theory to realise that the skyline of London is graced with some of the most humorous and most unexpected buildings and monuments in the world.
It is impossible to single out any particular building, but I will choose a few examples to show the way in which Mr Long has humorously and selectively illustrated his spectacular vernacular.
In a quick flick through a few pages I have found the remaining clock tower of Caledonian Meat Market in Islington whose clock is still regularly wound, the gargantuan tower of the Port of London Authority building at Tower Hill, the Arts and Crafts Blackfriars pub near the eponymous bridge, the Reform Club in Pall Mall and the secretive group of gentleman’s apartments at the Albany.
These were Mr Long’s personal choices and all the better for it.
Could I come up with a better list of equally quirky and humorous buildings round London? I'll give it some thought;why not. In the meantime I'm off to visit the Grenadier public house in Wilton Row in the hope that i will find a genuine pint of English ale alongside - you've guessed it - a bewildering diversty of cold bubbly would-be beers that are less worthy of a London welcome that the Shri Swaminarayan Temple in Neasden.