Discover the fascinating architectural history of this significant area, anchored around one of London’s most popular destinations, Covent Garden Market and Piazza, Inigo Jones’ late 17th-century revolutionary slice of town planning for the Earl of Bedford.

 

Steeped in history, this buzzing retail and cultural hotspot will take you on a journey through time. The walk leads from the 18th-century formality of one of London’s best-preserved squares on the Bedford Estate to the 21st-century version in Renzo Piano’s Central St Giles.

 

A mix of ingenious modern infills rising inside the original street grid respect, revitalise and protect this buzzing and densely populated residential, retail and office zone, with major cultural institutions including the London Transport Museum in the former Covent Garden Flower Market Building, and the refurbished Royal Opera House by Stanton Williams.

 

 

Book-ended by Buckingham Palace to the west and Westminster Abbey to the east, Victoria is a truly unique neighbourhood, experiencing unprecedented new developments and rebuilds. 

 

Traditionally known for being a transport hub, discover the residential, office and retail projects that are helping to create a fresh new look for this bustling area.  

 

At the heart of the area, our walk will explore the renovation of Cardinal Place by EPR Architects, which was the first step in making Victoria a vibrant area to live, work and socialise. Adjacent to the Cathedral Piazza, an entire retrofit of 1970’s classic Elsom Pack and Roberts’ Ashdown House (renamed 123 Victoria Street) has been refurbished by Aukett Swanke, while the landmark mixed-use development by Pelli Clarke Pelli Architects restores cinema to Victoria, side by side with quality big-name restaurant chains at ground level. 

 

 

 

Undergoing massive renewal, explore the significant new developments following the legacy of the 2012 Olympic Games of the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.
 
Explore the East Bank, the UK’s newest cultural quarter, masterplanned by Allies and Morrison, with public realm by LDA Design. Renowned institutions including the BBC, V&A, Sadler’s Wells, London College of Fashion and Washington’s Smithsonian Collection move into impressive new homes designed by co-architects O’Donnell +Tuomey and Camps Felip Arquitecturia. Sited on the River Lea waterfront, they will all share a new common ground that will bring art and culture outdoors.  
 
The 2012 Olympics site expanded its legacy role with two live/work schemes in the International Quarter London, a new neighbourhood in the heart of Stratford by Rogers Stirk Harbour Partners.  The project is nearing completion with a timber-framed public hub – the IQL Pavilion by Coffey Architects – and the existing Manhattan Lofts Gardens scheme by SOM at Stratford International Station – the tallest building in the area.  
 
To the south of the Park a vast new campus has emerged for UCL East, designed by architects Stanton Williams and Lifschutz Davidson Sandlilands. To the west, the Hawkins\Brown retrofitted 2012 Broadcasting Centre, now called Here East, supplies London’s acute need for flexible, affordable, small-scale workspace in its new extension The Gantry. Here East is now home to BT Sport and The Bartlett, plus a new East London V&A Collection and Research Centre by US architects Diller Scofidio+Renfro. The pivotal 2012 Games icons – Zaha Hadid’s Aquatic Centre, Michael Hopkins’ Velodrome, HOK’s London Stadium and Make’s Copper Box – complete this jam-packed tour. On the tour, we will be joined by LDA Design, the consultancy behind the final landscape masterplan for the 2012 Olympic Park and its transition into the park we see today.

 

 

 

Discover one of north London’s most exciting destinations and central London’s largest regeneration project – King’s Cross St Pancras.

 

Centred around two 19th-century railway stations - now joined and re-purposed for Eurostar – are 67 transformed acres of live, work, leisure and learning buildings, on the once derelict railway lands. The £3 billion masterplan, designed by Allies and Morrison and Porphyrios Architects and led by developer Argent, hosts the business hub, Pancras Square, on an old gasworks site where new office buildings designed by David Chipperfield, Eric Parry, and Bennetts will soon be joined by Heatherwick/BIG designed Google headquarters due to complete by 2023. 

 

North beyond the Regent’s Canal public winding walkways and landscaped gardens surround new apartments, schools, shops, offices, and cultural institutions, to create a vibrant traffic-free destination. Heritage buildings have been resurrected including the landmark Granary Building, which houses Central St Martins School of Art, designed by Stanton Williams, in its old transit sheds. The re-purposed Coal Drops Yard, designed by Heatherwick Studios, and reworked Victorian Coal and Fish Offices, by David Morley Architects, lead into a multi-level shopping and dining destination, adjacent to Wilkinson Eyre’s Gasholder apartments and Bell Phillips’ Gasholder Park. 

 

Public winding walkways and landscaped gardens surround new apartments, schools, shops, offices, theatres, cultural institutions and cinemas. Architectural practices including Wilkinson Eyre, Squire and Partners, Mossessian Architecture, AHMM, Macreanor Lavington, Fumihiko Maki, as well as younger generation Duggan Morris and Coffey Architects, ensure the ongoing regeneration continues to meet London’s expectations.  

 

Take a walk through the historic and financial heart of London, where the oldest and newest buildings stand side by side. The City of London continues to experience ongoing regeneration, with some of the tallest and most high-profile skyscrapers, alongside creative public realm projects and cultural buildings.

 

The industrial aesthetic expressed in Richard Rogers’ 1984 Lloyd’s Building unleashed a sea change in architecture within the City, with a tradition-breaking legacy of Portland Stone facades and a cluster of ever-taller office towers including his own 122 Leadenhall Street.

 

Within a tiny perimeter, dictated by legal sightline constraints, glass tower offices at 52-54 Lime Street (KPF), 100 Bishopsgate (Allies and Morrison/Woods Baggot) and 22 Bishopsgate (PLP) have set the bar to new heights, to be challenged by oncoming 40 Leadenhall Street (Make Architects), 1 Undershaft (Eric Parry), 100 Leadenhall Street (SOM) and 6-8 Bishopsgate (Wilkinson Eyre) within the next few years. 

 

In contrast, the nearby ‘groundscraper’ Fen Court by Eric Parry sits at just 15-storeys high, alternatively drawing attention with colourful illuminations emanating from its ‘coronet’ top and a spacious public viewing garden complete with rill. 

 

New lower-height developments like the mixed new/retrofitted Angel Court by Fletcher Priest Architects and OMA’s Rothschild Bank enhance the Bank Junction area. The 2018 RIBA prize-winning Bloomberg Square by Foster + Partners is noted for its co-joined bronze and sandstone offices, covering 3.2 acres surrounded by a bronze running water feature – a nod to the sustainability of the project. 

 

Walk from Southwark station to London Bridge - weaving through once-forgotten back streets to bustling pedestrian thoroughfares - to explore and understand Bankside's regeneration, including such game-changing projects as the Millennium Bridge, Tate Modern and the Shard. 

 

Sitting just south of the river, Bankside has found its new identity in large-scale public and private projects dating from the Millennium. Transport for London has saved Jubilee Line Southwark station with a new design by MJP Architects, featuring a light-filled rotunda. Opposite Will Alsop’s cantilevered Palestra building leads the walk into the Low Line – a maze of brick-lined railway viaducts overhead and alleys below connecting new hubs of creativity, entertainment and industry. 

 

Music Box, a 14-storey luxury residential/educational pavilion by Spaarc Architecture, sits side by side with the railway, while hillside-like residential terraces of Bear Lane by Panter Hudspith complement the surrounding 19th-century warehouses and light industrial buildings. 

 

Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners Neo Bankside is a residential pavilion pointing the way to Tate Modern by Herzog de Meuron via its Blavatnik Building extension. The three-part Bankside Mix on Southwark Street sits opposite the architect Allies and Morrison’s own offices and indicates the practice’s prominent master-planner role in Bankside’s revival. 

 

To the east, Renzo Piano’s 'The Shard' looms over Union Street’s residual Dickensian character, while new office infills by AHMM and Alan Camp Architects below busy railway tracks exploit every last meter. Borough Market’s new Viaduct, designed by Jestico Whiles, and Ted Cullinan’s revival of a medieval palace ruin refresh Bankside’s 21st-century coming of age.

 

Join us on foot through Canary Wharf and explore new developments and the arrival of the Elizabeth Line, as we wander through Foster + Partners and Gillespies tropical rooftop park under its translucent polymer roof. Originally a financial centre to rival the City of London, there is now more to the Wharf than commerce. It is a socially integrated district where people work, live and play.

 

West India Quay’s row of converted warehouses is the sole reminder of the area’s original 18th-century hand-built walled dock. Chicago’s SOM Architects master-planned the epic 1980s Canary Wharf regeneration to accommodate financial services crowding out the City of London. 

 

A floating pedestrian bridge, by Future Systems, links the Quay to the Wharf, while a Memphis-inspired Post-Modern hotel, designed by Philippe Starck, and a nautically-inspired riverside residence The Cascades, by CZWG, are among new heritage gems. Gensler’s Columbus Courtyard offices were the first to open and now the 75-storey Newfoundland Quay, by Horden Cherry Lee, one of the first of a new generation of residential towers inside the Canary Wharf Group boundary. 

 

Adjacent is KPF’s Bank Street office tower and residential tower Landmark Pinnacle by Squire and Partners. Halfway along the Wharf axis route and SOM’s Chicago/Post Modern pastiche, sits the Canary Wharf Docklands station built into One Canada Square by Cesar Pelli. From there to the east end of the Wharf, Foster + Partners’ forest of glass towers predominates, with Marshall Straballa and Kohn Pederson Fox contributions.

 

New urban district Wood Wharf, with Floating Pavillions by Glen Howells is part of an interconnected series of bridges and boardwalks, creating new pedestrian infrastructure with two new landmark residence towers - 10 Park Drive by Stanton Williams and One Park Drive by Herzog de Meuron - signal just the start of a 23-acre new community.

 

 

Discover Shoreditch, London’s creative urban neighbourhood with an ever-changing supply of start-ups, independent cafes, underground clubs, event spaces and pop-up retail. This area of east London is undergoing unprecedented transformation through infrastructure, innovation and mixed-use development.

 

Shoreditch evolves onwards and upwards - accommodating major new schemes like Principal Place by Foster + Partners, the old High Street’s first residential tower that masks the lower-range offices for Amazon behind. The 100-year-old iconic Tea Building factory retrofitted by AHMM 20 years ago attracted a new generation of media and digital creatives, with warehouses knocked together and extended into more workshops, studios and boutique hotels by architects Duggan Morris, Witherford Watson Mann, Conran and Partners among others. 

 

David Adjaye’s landmark visual arts gallery in Rivington Place confirmed the area’s serious credentials. Large-scale, 1960s retrofits like the expanded Ace Hotel by EPR and more recently Arnold House by Buckley Grey Yeoman enjoy extended new life on the main streets. The warehouse aesthetic is underlined by the Curtain Hotel pastiche by Dexter Moren, complete with a roof pool. Close by on Curtain Road is a mammoth-sized new residential and office development The Stage by Perkins+Will - so named for Shakespeare’s weighty associations with the area. New build, low-rise flexible workspaces like Frames by Squire and Partners and the Japanese-themed ‘fragmented’ Nobu Hotel by Ron Arad/Ben Adams, confirm the area’s new sophisticated status as it segues into the new configuration of Old Street Roundabout by Weston Williamson + Partners and overlooked by the large-scale retrofitted White Collar Factory and Bower schemes, both by AHMM.

 

Constructed in the early nineteenth century as a commercial waterway to transport goods across the north of London, the Regent’s Canal is now one of London’s most popular recreational waterways and an increasingly attractive place to live and work. 

This tour begins in Islington and proceeds east to Cambridge Heath Bridge, taking in the adaptive reuse of industrial buildings, new mixed-use developments, two major estate regeneration projects (the Packington and Colville Estates), and the glassy skyscrapers at Regent’s Canal Basin—as well as an imposing sculpture depicting Alfred Hitchcock. We will look at the extent to which both new and adaptive projects consider the ecosystem of the canal and the local character of the area. Our stops include projects designed by Pollard Thomas Edwards, Munkenbeck & Marshall, Karakusevic Carson and David Chipperfield, Alford Hall Monaghan Morris.  

 

 

Explore new developments around Oxford Circus and discover the way new architectural planning has threaded into the dense social area.

We also see how retrofits and new-builds from leading practices such as Eric Parry Architects renew the 350-year-old landscape of the world behind Regent Street in Mayfair.

All our walks are led by experienced Blue Badge Guides

Start: In front of The Criterion Theatre in Piccadilly Circus