From Renaissance engineers to industrial age generals, military planners have used models to set out their strategy. Taking the form of three dimensional topographical maps, they were vital for designing town-sized forts and planning the advance of armies. It was only at the beginning of the twentieth century, however, that mechanised warfare, powered flight and radio communications made the targeting of small areas or even individual buildings possible; as a result of this tactical change, accurate, proportionately-reduced (‘scale’) reproductions of specific structures were now needed. Allowing participants to recognise their objective from a range of angles and heights, study its relationship with other features in the landscape and more easily orientate themselves during the mission itself, the creation and use of such models has been key to the success of five notable operations.

++ 1911: Trying murder suspects, London, UK ++

A precursor of sorts occurred before the Great War, during a court case at the Old Bailey. The previous year three police officers had been shot after discovering a burglary at a City of London jewellers’; the suspects, Latvian revolutionaries, fled and were finally caught weeks later after what became known as the Siege of Sidney Street, where involvement of the military was required to match the criminals’ firepower. The focus of the criminal trial was the location of the murders, however, a cul-de-sac called Exchange Buildings. The complexity of the Georgian terraces there and in the parallel Houndsditch as well as the yard between the two were, the police felt, best clarified for the jury by a model. Made of wood by a police carpenter, it showed every floor of 119 Houndsditch and 9, 10 and 11 Exchange Buildings and could be opened up to show the interior layout. This was achieved by hinged panels like those of a dolls’ house, but the upper storeys could also be lifted to show the ground floor in plan. Doors within the model were openable.

Only one of the accused was convicted, but use of the model was a prescient move and had a remarkable echo one hundred years later.

++ 1942: Capturing radar secrets, Bruneval, France ++

Operation Biting was an audacious Allied airborne raid on a coastal villa in whose grounds was sited a radar installation believed to be part of the German nightfighter control system. Codenamed Würzburg according to decrypted messages, other examples were known but that near the village of Bruneval offered a chance to obtain pieces of the apparatus and, perhaps, an operator so that countermeasures could be designed to protect Allied bombers. One company of paratroopers would be dropped at night to take the radar station and house and defend both against attack from the German barracks close by. Another was to guard the nearby beach, from which all personnel and equipment would be taken off by the Royal Navy at the conclusion of the mission. To help plan this complex, combined operations assault two models were constructed by the RAF’s Central Interpretation Unit at Medmenham, Buckinghamshire. The first was of the overall area, including the line of cliffs that overlooked the Channel and a ravine that led to the vital beach. The second showed the villa and radar set in detail, the paths that led to them and the defences around both. A wide range of sources informed the builds – maps, reports from agents and aerial photography, especially a famous image by pilot Tony Hill of the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit which had revealed the equipment’s presence. Hardboard was cut to make the contours, then smoothed with power chisels and filled with a mixture of plaster of Paris, glue size and wood pulp. Hedgerows were formed from green paste using an air nozzle; buildings were made of linoleum. Training included rehearsals for the beach phase on the south coast of England.

RAF transport aircraft flew the assault force in on the night of 27 February 1942. Most of the 120 paratroopers landed exactly on target, moving toward the villa and taking control of it and the Würzburg in minutes. Under their protection, an RAF technician supervised examination and disassembly of the radar by engineers. Although the part of the force that was to occupy the beach dropped much further from it than planned, a rapid change of tactics and some sharp fighting saw German defences subdued, all but six of the men (plus a prisoner) safely evacuated from the beach and only two fatalities on the British side.

++ 1944: Destroying identity records, The Hague, The Netherlands ++

Establishment by the Gestapo of a Centrale Bevolkingsregister or population registry in The Hague frustrated attempts by the Dutch resistance to forge identity cards for civilians, agents and escaped airmen and so in late 1943 a request was made for the RAF to bomb the Villa Kleykamp, a large Neoclassical house, where it was located. Six Mosquito bombers from 613 Squadron were assigned to the attack, and planning it also involved the construction of two models. An overview was made at 1:6,250 scale of every house and building in the wider area along with roads, forests, water features and fields, realistically coloured as the raid would take place in daylight. Its purpose was to assist the crews with in-flight navigation and their approach. The villa (indicated with an arrow) and its immediate context were then modelled at an enlarged scale so that the building itself could be identified and nearby hazards such as the Vredespaleis (Peace Palace) across the road, built to house the Cour permanente d'arbitrage or Permanent Court of Arbitration, noted. “We had paid especial attention to a number of chimneys,” Wing Commander Robert Bateson later observed, and indeed Medmenham staff were using commercial electro-opto-mechanical photogrammetric plotters to create highly accurate, correctly-scaled plans from stereographic aerial imagery. These could also be used to estimate heights.

The attack took place on 11 April 1944 in two waves. Flying their final run at an altitude of 60 feet – lower than the roof of the villa, Bateson said – the Mosquitos used delayed-action high explosives to open up the building and then incendiaries to burn the paper files inside it. The raid destroyed the premises and many of the crucial records and damage to surrounding buildings was minimal – the Peace Palace suffered a broken window. There were casualties on the ground but none of the aircraft was even hit. The value of the models is clear from Bateson’s comments.

++ 1944: Seizing vital bridges, Caen, France ++

Less than two months later Operation Deadstick was a key action to support D-Day, with the aim of securing a road bridge over the Caen canal and another nearby that crossed the Orne river. Both were needed to enable the British invasion force to move inland from Sword beach, five miles to the west. To address this distance, ensure troops arrived together and achieve surprise it was decided to land the assault team in six gliders; a much larger group of paratroopers were to descend within the hour to reinforce the position and resist any German counterattack. Models of the area were again made, so that the glider pilots could familiarise themselves with their destination and plot the best course to it when flying at night. Terrain models could be easily illuminated to reflect the scene as it would appear during the raid, and water courses were a useful navigation aid but also a known source of confusion (models for other operations were even photographed under the relevant lighting conditions and the prints distributed to those taking part). Man-made and natural features were incorporated by reference to maps and aerial reconnaissance photographs, enlarged or reduced as needed. The planning for this mission integrated viewings of the models with training around a similar pair of actual bridges over the Exeter Ship Canal in Devon, where the glider pilots flew wearing dark goggles to simulate night.

The actual assault took place on 5/6 June 1944, with each of six gliders carrying a mixed force of infantry and engineers. The first landed exactly on target at a quarter past midnight, with four more arriving close by thereafter. Within ten minutes both bridges had been seized with minimal casualties, after which the assaulters dug in to await the paratroopers. Hours later the D-Day landings commenced, making Operation Deadstick the first combat of the Allied invasion of Europe.

++ 1980: Breaking a siege, London, UK ++

Peace does not always mean the military is at rest. When Iranian Arabs took over the Iranian Embassy in London insisting on independence for their province, a siege ensued during which members of the public, staff and a policeman were held and threatened. Negotiations commenced but plans were also made by the police and the recently-formed Counter Revolutionary Warfare (CRW) wing of the British Army’s Special Air Service Regiment to forcibly enter the embassy if necessary. The roof was explored and prepared, microphones were embedded in walls and intelligence was gained as to its security features. Plans were also acquired, which enabled the construction of an elaborate seven-part model showing the layout of each floor from basement to roof. Able to be stacked or taken apart as needed, the sections were made from wood and cardboard and included rooms, stairs, terraces and window bays. Annotations added useful detail. Testimony from released hostages, cross-referenced with users of the embassy and surveillance information, meant the likely location of those within the building could be plotted and routes through it determined in preparation for a raid. When a hostage was murdered on the evening of the sixth day of the siege, approval was given for the SAS to storm the embassy at their discretion.

At the given moment a simultaneous assault was made through the first floor windows at the front of the building – explosive actions famously broadcast live on television – and the upper windows at the rear. The SAS troopers then moved through building, engaging the terrorists and locating the hostages until all were accounted for. Operation Nimrod lasted seventeen minutes, and ended with five of the six terrorists dead and all but one of the hostages rescued alive.

++ 2011: Finding bin Laden; Abbottabad, Pakistan ++

The American government spent ten years trying to find Osama bin Laden, founder and leader of Al Qaida and so ultimately responsible for the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. Led by the Central Intelligence Agency, the effort ultimately focussed on couriers linked to bin Laden and culminated in discovery of a one-acre residential compound in the suburbs of Abbottabad. Its unidentified occupants were otherwise isolated socially, electronically and visually, this last due to high walls around not just the complex but a terrace on the third floor of the main house. Satellite photography, drone footage and imagery from ground observations was analysed by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency with post-war techniques such as digital data capture and digital elevation models. These were used to produce a computer-generated visualisation of the buildings, perimeter walls and other structures that could be explored virtually but the data was also used to generate components for a physical model via rapid prototyping (‘3D printing’). These were painted, assembled on a base board and detailed with the barbed wire, foliage and vehicles associated with the actual location. One inch of the model represented a distance of seven feet in real life, a scale perhaps chosen to reflect the 6’ 4” height of bin Laden given its importance to the intelligence assessment of who was living there. The model was used by military officers and politicians to explore options; once the decision was made to use a special forces unit to assault the compound, a full-size replica was deemed necessary and two were erected in the United States in the months before the raid.

Operation Neptune Spear was initiated on 2 May 2011 when a contingent of the US Naval Special Warfare Development Group (DEVGRU, popularly known as SEAL Team Six) arrived over the Abbottabad compound in two stealthed helicopters. Despite the loss of one on landing, the team killed a number of those inside the buildings including a man later confirmed by DNA sampling to be Osama bin Laden. None of the operators was injured and all returned safely.

News that Lloyd’s of London is progressing plans to reshape its Richard Rogers-designed home for a digital age draws attention to something of a paradox. Media coverage, user complaints and institutional discretion have combined over the years to suggest a building unchanged and even unchangeable, yet it was designed to be flexible, the statutory protection afforded by its Grade I listing recognises and even encourages this and it has in fact been modified many times, before, during and after construction. So how might these past decisions help or hinder a new future for the Lloyd’s building?

This largely hidden history of change at Lime Street between the start of design in 1978 and completion of construction in 1986, and in the decades since, is also a record of compromise between intent and reality. It includes missed opportunities that might now come back to bite Lloyd’s and latent potential that could still be exploited for its benefit.

Let’s start with the structure. It is not generally appreciated that Lloyd’s was conceived as a steel building. This reflected Rogers’s practice to date and suited the client, who feared the crudeness of concrete. London fire regulations, however, would not permit steel, forcing a change to fair-faced, in-situ reinforced concrete. Mixed and poured skilfully and continuously for a fine, silken finish, this in the end proved very acceptable aesthetically whilst also acting as a useful heat sink. The glass blocks Rogers preferred to give sparkle to the windows were also abandoned at the design stage in favour of a rolled sheet glass indented with tiny discs to give a similar effect; ten years ago, though, over a thousand of these panes were in turn replaced with clear glass to increase levels of daylight within the building.

Barely a decade after completion major remedial action was needed to address corrosion and leaks in a range of different pipes, risers and casings. This leads us to the service towers. The building was designed before the information technology revolution but constructed as that happened and so the extra power, cabling and cooling plant had to be accommodated somewhere. The only space available was at the tops of the towers, intended to be slim in reference to mediaeval Italian precedents but which now had to be massively enlarged. At the same time aluminium as a cladding material was swapped for stainless steel as part of the same response to fire regulations.

The famous blue cranes stayed proudly visible when not in use and were intended to do much more than merely hold a cleaning cradle. They have however never been able to bear enough weight nor move quite as needed to function in any wider capacity – today, they are no longer compliant with regulation and best practice as well as being themselves hard to repair (spares are unobtainable and “pertinent documentation” is lost). Accordingly a programme to remove all eighteen of the building’s cranes and replace them with modern hydraulic-boom building maintenance units is, at the time of writing, about three quarters complete. They will still be painted blue and the planning application says they will now become “the lifting cranes envisaged” by Rogers.

A hard-landscaped undercroft held the members’ restaurant or Captain’s Room and other private spaces, accessed via a main entrance that was altered and enlarged a dozen years after opening to improve circulation. Anyone can pass around, under and even between elements of the building here, though, stitching it into the local streetscape and extending the City’s distinctive network of courts, lanes and alleys. Provision was also made for Lloyd’s to be plugged into the network of high-level pedestrian walkways – more extensive then than today – but this was never enacted. A shop and wine bar were open to the public at this lower ground level, although this has varied over the years. A separate entrance in one of the service towers led to an exhibition of Lloyd’s history on gallery four that also allowed visitors to observe the Room in action but this was subsequently closed.

With interiors proper the look of most rooms was predetermined by the building’s architecture, carried through from the outside and unhidden by suspended ceilings, plasterboard or even paint. The ‘box’ or desk-cum-carrel where underwriters sit grew out of the benches of Edward Lloyd’s coffee house but was neatly reinvented for a new century as a modular kit of precision metal and timber parts that also housed the newly-necessary electronics, air conditioning and power. These remain in use but other types of box have been introduced as fresh syndicates are admitted and the plan indicates more will come. More prosaically, the vivid blue carpeting has been changed for a more neutral hue.

For the sensitive executive areas Rogers commissioned Eva Jiřičná after seeing her metal and glass staircases in Joseph stores – she would go on to craft the Harrods’ Way-In boutique in a similar vein with fellow Czech Jan Kaplický. At Lloyd’s, however, some of her ideas were rejected outright, including an all-glass promenade surrounding the preserved 18th century Adam Room and a very contemporary Chairman’s Suite. This and the remaining representative interiors were instead designed and furnished by Jacques Grange of Paris in a historicising style that one magazine’s reviewer bluntly described as “a warning to other companies who may employ a world-class architect and then call in someone of lesser ability to decorate his work.” Jiřičná’s braced curves of fabric in the Captain’s Room, evoking Lloyd’s nautical roots, were accepted. Covering the windows and forming moveable screens to the other dining and drinking spaces at this level, they survived until around 2000.

Which brings us to the heart of Lloyd’s and its present plans – the Room. A single volume allowing personal interaction between large numbers of people is fundamental to Lloyd’s business and so the Underwriters’ Room was the main driver of the brief. Lloyd’s had also outgrown two purpose-built homes in fifty years, the second with a Room twice the size of the first. Rogers answered with a philosophical concept as much as a physical space, since his Room is defined as the double-height ground floor of a central atrium and those galleries or upper floors that are, at any given time, fitted with half-height balustrades and connected to it by escalator. Galleries with full-height glazing are let to tenants who reach them solely via the external glass lifts, but any floor can be adapted to either condition, expanding or contracting the Room as needed. With that past only one of those options ever appeared likely but in truth the run of escalators stops at gallery four and the Room has been stable for most of its working life, comprising the ground and first three galleries though sometimes also part of the fourth for a nominal total area of about 200,000 square feet and a daily occupancy of around 5,000 people.

So that is the past. How could it and its lessons affect the future?

We are told by Lloyd’s that “The way the Underwriting Room was being used was already changing pre-pandemic” although no detail is given. In any event hybrid working, whereby market makers meet in person and digitally, is now happening and will stay – that much was clear in press interviews with Lloyd’s chairman almost a year ago. This is also referred to in the status update as “mixed presence” but with the spectre of technology provision for the future arising again a quick check of progress so far suggests Lloyd’s are some way behind that particular curve – the functionality is little different from the consumer-level applications we have all been using lately and the experience far less compelling than, say, Cisco’s long-established telepresence suites where the remote parties’ image feed also supplies the missing half of the conference room table in front of you so as to better sell the illusion of a proper face-to-face meeting. Fortunately Rogers’s building included plentiful ducting and raised floors so it seems unlikely to be caught out again if the right kit can be specified (once over that IT shock the building’s initial electronics fit-out was state-of-the-art but now, of course, reads like a roll call of dead platforms and suppliers since Prestel, Wang and telex are all museum exhibits; the energy management system, meanwhile, was a “minicomputer” yet with just 20Mb of memory, the equivalent of a couple of smartphone photos today).

The Room, then, is almost certain to be reduced more definitively, though to what extent, by what means and for what purpose is unknown. That retracting it rather further even than Rogers envisaged – to just the ground floor, say, or only a couple of the galleries – might lead to removal of any of those escalators is surely as unlikely as installing new ones always seemed. It’s also hard to envisage infilling or flooring over any part of the twelve storey, sixty-metre-high atrium, artistically or practically.

As for what any disconnected floors might be used for, reading of a need only now identified for client areas, touchdown space, quiet spots and wellbeing provision again feels like Lloyd’s is very much playing catch-up. This is perhaps the legacy of both its specialisation and a certain insularity, and inclusion of a broadcast centre and auditorium amongst these ‘wants’ tends to confirm this: Rogers’s Lloyd’s actually had a television studio but operating only on a closed circuit, to provide information to underwriters. Press reports speculate over the possibility of a for-hire events venue and a restaurant with viewing gallery open to all(!) but the word ‘public’ doesn’t appear in Lloyd’s update and so one wonders just who is being imagined as the beneficiaries of “bespoke experiences for different stakeholders”, another idea floated in the research.

Lloyd’s are promising to share their “final vision” before October and the final design by their chosen architect no later than March 2022. Any works that emerge will need planning permission and listed building consent, in which context it’s worth noting that Heritage England’s designation description, openly developed with Lloyd’s and the Corporation of London, is carefully worded. The building’s crucial ‘special interest’ is defined in part as “the in-built flexibility of its design that would respond to changing needs in the market” and the same sentence notes that this “has allowed regular changes to work satisfactorily” to date. It may therefore be an enabler as well as a defence, but as with all insurance policies, you don’t really know what it covers until you claim.

It often seems that nowhere in central London can escape redevelopment. To find a location that has managed to fend off successive schemes for fifty years, even as the bulldozers chip away at its immediate context, is remarkable. But just such a place emerges if you delve into both my own past and that of the site itself…

Today’s Edgware Road tube station on the Circle, District and Met Lines was built in 1928, a reconstruction of a stop on the world’s first subway that had originally opened sixty years before. Its platforms were just below street level and open to the sky, a result of the cut-and-cover method used to create the line which here paralleled the route of Marylebone Road as it ran east across the capital; the long, north-south road from Marble Arch to St Albans that gave the station its name was a short walk away to the west. Staircases led up to the two-storey station building on the corner of Cabbell Street and Chapel Street by rail company architect Charles W. Charles, clad in faience. Abutting this was a terrace of Georgian houses, its end wall to the junction with Lisson Street soon decorated with a great hand-painted sign. Beyond that side road a second terrace met Griffith House, an industrial block facing Old Marylebone Road at the eastern limit of the plot.

Post-war development came to the area with the first tower, erected in 1961 on the other side of Cabbell Street. A few years later the newly-formed Westminster council mandated three more, one on each remaining corner of the cross-roads formed by Edgware Road and Marylebone Road, to make a ‘gateway’ to London from the west and north. The Marylebone flyover was built during this time, its ramp cutting Lisson Street in half and causing the Chapel Street stretch to be renamed Transept Street.

The earliest plans for redevelopment of the Edgware Road Underground site date from this period, when in 1973 a building of stepped form (four, five and six storeys) was proposed to house flats, offices and a new station; Griffith House would remain. Enough work had been done two years later to validate the planning grant and the eastern-most terrace of houses was demolished in 1977 but nothing further came of the scheme.

A larger building of seven storeys throughout was given permission in 1980 and the architectural practice of no less a figure than Richard Seifert was responsible for the design, which was developed at least until 1982. Perspectives show a ground floor of glazed shopfronts framed in pale concrete or stone, two floors of offices in what is probably brick whose bronzed, boxed-out windows carry through both levels and four floors of balconied flats above that, set back to reduce their bulk. A loading bay is visible, which might also have provided access to the approved car park. Entrance to the station itself is relocated to Chapel Street roughly in line with Transept Street (which was in turn permanently closed the year of the grant) and marked by a neat treatment of the Underground roundel. This, too, did not proceed but the concept had not been forgotten.

In 1988 a planning brief issued by Westminster council required the entire site to be considered, ‘a gain in residential accommodation’ to result and better circulation through the station and immediate area to be provided. Developer Taylor Woodrow partnered with London Transport and engaged another major commercial architecture practice, RHWL, to try to achieve it. They brought forward an even bigger scheme that exploited the air rights principle by decking over the railway tracks. Three buildings, still of different heights but now reaching 12 storeys at the western end, were of ‘overtly modern’ form and clad in ‘sinuous flowing’ glass. They were connected on the upper floors and by an internal street. Brick-faced blocks held the residential component and ground floor arcades were provided as a public amenity which also linked new entrances to the station. A modest car park, shared between the uses, was squeezed into a basement alongside the tracks.

Considered by the council to be a ‘rational response’ to a difficult site and ‘acceptable’ thanks to its overall form and detail, its size was nevertheless recorded as ‘the absolute maximum that can be recommended’ and a warning sounded that ‘the sheer scale of the building threatens to overpower the architectural devices designed to enclose it.’ For the same reason an entirely brick façade – on the face of it more suitable for the context – was not requested as this was thought to risk a ‘clumsy agglomeration’ of traditional motifs when deployed to cover so great a volume.

Various amendments took place over the five years that followed, addressing the impact on light and views for the council-owned flats on the other side of Marylebone Road and adjusting the balance between commercial and residential elements. At about the same time the terrace of houses abutting the existing station building was demolished. Failure to secure a pre-let for any of the new blocks coincided with the recession to halt the project in 1993.

In 1998 yet another attempt was made to build out the site with a concept that placed elliptically-planned towers at either end of a mid-rise block but this did not even get as far as planning. This was despite the comprehensive redevelopment of Paddington Basin beginning just a few hundred metres to west, a project that continues today. The Edgware Road station site thus remained stubbornly untouched with its Edwardian building now standing alone and the wider area used as an Underground depot and car park accessed via the now-gated Transept Street.

In about 2012, though, activity could be seen in the railway sidings to the south of the station platforms, used for stabling trains and until then backed by a simple brick wall. In Chapel Street above hoardings went up and plant arrived; excavation ensued, followed by lots of concrete being poured. Finally, after a couple of years, a boxy arrangement of volumes in a striking wallpaper-like finish appeared, rising from those sidings and baffling me, commuters and passers-by alike. Too small for an office block or apartments, with no windows anyway and no obvious way in either, what on earth is it?

New trains on the Metropolitan, Circle, District and Hammersmith & City Lines are mechanically more effective, feature air conditioning and electronic signage and as a result require more electricity than their predecessors. This comes from bulk supply points, a type of electricity sub-station that takes power from the national grid and manages its introduction into users’ own networks. It’s one of these that has been built at Edgware Road. Comprising two sub-basements housing cableways and switchgear topped by a double-height space for the transformers, the engineering is impressive. A diaphragm wall made from sheet piles 17 metres deep enabled the excavation, which in turn meant taking away 1,200 lorry loads of earth. Innovative fibre-reinforced concrete brought fire protection and waterproofing, reduced the amount of steel and allowed thinner walls for increased space. Those transformers, housed in a 10 metre high space, weigh hundreds of tonnes.

Nevertheless Pringle Richards Sharratt, the practice responsible for the project, ruefully notes that such a workmanlike structure failed to possess ‘its own aesthetic’ when completed. In such cases ‘the architect is faced with the choice of a bland box or an ornament’ so they have chosen the latter, with client subsidiary Art on the Underground commissioning a work by Jacqueline Poncelet called Wrapper. Its patterns and colours seek to echo those of local transport, flora and trade and were made using vitreous enamelling, screen printed ceramic inks that were baked on to 1,500 square metres of steel panels. Produced in Wales, they took nine months to install via an aluminium frame.

So now you know. It’s a bold idea and whilst I’m not sure it is fully effective, it does give diversion for the eye and the mind. Whether its presence will finally put a stop to development plans for the wider site is perhaps another question. Electrical sub-stations are often incorporated within new buildings, but they are usually re-clad to match; it’s hard to imagine the opposite, a building being re-clad to match a sub-station. On the other hand, Wrapper is billed as a permanent work of art and presumably cost a fair amount of public money too, so it’s surely unlikely to be ripped off and thrown away like its paper namesake. Another fifty years will probably tell.

Released thirty years ago today, this follow-up to the film that made both director James Cameron’s name and that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, his lead actor, was one of the biggest genre events of the time, as I remember well. Its plot was ingenious, logically continuing that of The Terminator (1984) whilst actually undoing the events that made the original possible, its moral messages compelling and its execution merged traditional action, albeit on an extravagant scale, with ground-breaking digital manipulation. Going from script to screen in just fourteen months, the most expensive production in Hollywood history earned five times as much at the box office and was universally acclaimed. Does it still hold up?

I saw it in Leicester Square, two days after its London opening and with a capacity crowd. It was the last of a handful of films that defined the cinema-going of my early adulthood, after Aliens (1986), Lethal Weapon (1987), Predator (1987), RoboCop (1987) and Die Hard (1988). As all were experienced as crisp new prints, often 70mm, on some of the largest screens in the UK, that cost record was T2’s least important attribute at the time though I was impressed with the visuals. In retrospect, though, I now think that part of the film’s strength is that every cent of the c.$100m that was spent in 1990-91 is there to be seen, in service of the story and with no hint of excess or waste. It looked like what it cost and it cost what it need to, though that disguises an interesting paradox that has taken three decades to emerge.

Critics and audiences responded positively to the film’s startling use of the ‘morphing’ or transition effect, in development since the late 1980s and part of a wider suite of computer-generated imagery brought to fruition two years later in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993). It is this that enabled the T-1000 to walk through cell bars, assume the forms of others and recover from gunshots. My own reaction was no different and was enhanced by realisation that it also permitted action film tropes to be smartly undermined, such as the impact of shotgun blast to the face that could now be seen directly from front and back before being annulled. Almost all of those shots are still entirely convincing. Looking back, however, what really stands out is just how sparing the deployment of this technique is throughout the film.

True, this was sometimes a consequence of its very expense – many of those bullet wounds actually ‘heal’ off-screen to save money, and although funds were available to correct the reversed street sign (‘Plummer’) that resulted from a last-minute decision to flip the shot of the truck crashing off the bridge, none could be found do the same to the smaller but nevertheless readable Freightliner logo on the truck’s grille, which remained backwards – but in general Cameron only uses it where narratively necessary and even then always grounds as much of the shot as possible in reality.

The explanation can be found in his years making low-budget exploitation films for Roger Corman, where money was always tight and in-camera tricks and good editing were necessary to make it stretch. Cameron therefore learned to establish a physical, real-world baseline of stunts, miniatures and animatronics before turning to more insubstantial realms. It’s an ethos fundamental to the success of T2’s action, most obviously in the climactic flight from the T-1000. An extended chase sequence that takes up fully a third of the film’s overall running time, it is still a truly epic feat of sustained, relentless tension and excitement that more than holds its own. Cameron was thus able to create a far more convincing mise en scene that one which relived entirely on the digital, a lesson that could be usefully be learned by many directors today.

The script (by Cameron and collaborator William Wisher) is simultaneously complementary to and an inversion of their work on the first film. Antagonist (“He was the enemy. He was death,” said Cameron of the Model 101) is now protagonist, lines of dialogue are re-used by others and in different contexts and indeed given the earlier Terminator becomes a faultless father, the mother becomes a merciless killer and the son that was dismissive now loves, each of the principals can be said to have flipped their own CPU from read-only to write (albeit that particular story beat was only revealed in the later special edition).

The Cold War, very much ‘on’ when the first film was released but a year over by the time of the second, informs not just the plot but its exposition. Skynet has obvious resonance with Colossus, the sentient, bunkered nuclear warfighting supercomputer in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970), something more apparent in an earlier script for the opening sequence where the John Connor of 2029 describes his enemy as sitting “in its fortress in the Colorado Rockies”. Another never-filmed scene would have shown inter-continental ballistic missiles, dread icon of that era, rising from silos beneath the playground of Sarah’s dreams. And as American ICBMs are launched by the turning of two keys in two locks, placed far enough apart to require two people and therefore mutual consent to operate, it is surely no co-incidence that the same system is needed to open the Cyberdyne vault where the remains of that first Terminator are kept.

In fact the film resonates wherever it touches the scale of ways humans wage armed conflict. The script initially had Sarah, in her ‘You don’t know what it’s like to create’ speech, pointing out that every gun ever invented was designed and named after a man, whilst Cameron fetishises yet also satirises movie firefights with his own Minigun sequence in the same way, and with the same weapon, as John McTiernan did in the ‘We hit nothing’ scene from his Predator – both directors are known pacifists. Children play with toy guns as John muses on the doomed nature of man with the Model 101, whilst even Sarah’s unconscious carving of a philosophical message with a simple knife recalls Einstein’s powerful quote about the weapons of any fourth world war.

From the simplicity of a blade to the simplicity of the circle, perhaps the most profound shape in human culture when symbolising the cycle of life and death. The circularity of T2’s story-telling is similarly satisfying as the final scene arrives. Warm, witty but also moving, it’s a reminder that the troubles of today and tomorrow are always present.

Shops in London are suffering, as I noted when looking at Oxford Street’s department stores and ways of bringing people back to the capital’s main shopping street. But last week, on a still-rare work day in town, I saw the former Kodak building on Kingsway under scaffolding and did a bit of digging. I was surprised to find that it once contained offices, retail and production facilities in a single, central London building, whilst more research showed that it was by no means the only well-known brand that has thought differently about merchandising across several topics (all beginning with ‘S’, below) and a hundred years or so. Perhaps those approaches can help us today?

1) Space: Kodak, 1911

Just before the Great War, the Kodak Company commissioned one of the earliest examples of a purpose-built office block in London to house not only its European headquarters but also a range of associated facilities and a flagship retail store to bring its popular photographic technology to the heart of the British capital. No. 61-65 Kingsway was designed by Sir John Burnet and Partners and built in 1911, one of a number of new commercial blocks lining a continental-style boulevard that had itself only been laid out a few years earlier and which featured street lighting and a tunnel for trams. Kodak’s new building was also highly advanced for the time, with a steel frame and casement windows, lifts, central heating and electric lighting. Its exterior used a minimum of decoration and emphasised the extent of the glazing. Inside, what we would now term its fit out included open-plan office floorplates and a staff restaurant, complemented by semi-industrial spaces such as an ancillary laboratory, photographic, dark and printing rooms and a warehouse. Marble and wood panelling was confined to the receptions and boardroom, with most areas finished in linoleum and brick. Burnet made a study tour of America in preparation for the project and whilst the austerity of the interior discomforted some, Kodak liked the simplicity – fittingly, I think, for a company whose smart advertising slogan (‘You press the button, we do the rest’) deliberately disarmed customers as to the complexity of its business.

2) Staff: Bourne & Hollingsworth, 1912

Founded in 1894 as a drapers, this department store was one of several to occupy purpose-built premises in Oxford Street. Family-owned until well after World War 2, the organization was paternalistic and in common with other large employers of the day maintained its own accommodation – off-site, and segregated – for its unmarried staff. The hostel for men was in Berners Street, with Warwickshire House (named after the county in which one of the partners was born) on Gower Street home to over 600 young women. Their board and lodging was paid for by the company, although they were required to strip and change their bed each day before and after work, and the building ultimately had a range of facilities including its own ballroom, swimming pool and dining hall. Like the girls’ school it resembled, sleeping and bathing were communal too and there was a curfew but attractions outside the doors were plentiful. Warwickshire House also permitted women who were not employees to stay, provided their references were satisfactory, a practice that continued into the 1960s when a new generation of single women were finding their freedom.

3) Supply: Sanderson, 1930

Initially selling only to trade via the wholesale market, the wallpaper firm began by Arthur Sanderson in 1860 expanded to produce paints and printed fabrics as the 1920s dawned. A few years later the firm’s technology was advanced enough to print faux wood and stone effects, laminates and vinyl and at the end of that decade, accompanying a plant for textiles in Uxbridge and a studio in Berners Street in the West End, a new factory for wallpaper manufacture was built in Perivale, Ealing. Barely more than a hamlet of farms at the time, the location offered large tracts of open land, easy access by rail and new, fast roads and was less than ten miles from Marble Arch. With its fancy Art Deco frontage concealing a vast, plain ‘shed’ for 900 workers, the structure proved more typical of the future than the small buildings, expanded in piecemeal fashion, that Sanderson had previously maintained in nearby urban Chiswick. By the time of Sanderson’s centenary the workforce had expanded to 1,650 and the site was of course surrounded by suburbia. Production there finally ceased in the 1970s.

4) Stock: John Lewis, 1963

John Lewis completed the rebuilding of its Oxford Street store in 1960 after wartime interruptions, before commissioning a radical new warehouse to the north of London to service it and other branches. It was designed by the noted Spanish-born Mexican engineer Félix Candela Outeriño, working with architects Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall and engineers Clarke Nicholls and Marcel. Simple concrete piers supported inverted square pyramids of board-marked concrete, joined together but pulled up where they face north so as to form gaps that were glazed as light scoops. Thus the serrated roof profile common to many such buildings was lent a structural sophistication as well as constructional efficiency by Candela’s thin-shell hyperbolic para¬boloids, which can be made with simpler formwork than the curved arches usually deployed for large-span spaces. Indeed, as set out in a 15 x 8 grid, their boldness epitomises the confidence of post-war engineering in Britain – this was Candela’s first European project. After fifty years of use by John Lewis, a recent sale has seen the structure restored and remodelled as a branch of Costco with a steel-framed extension yet the loading bays removed to expose much of Candela’s work.

5) Support: Sainsbury, 2000

As stores become chains and those chains in turn grow, the administrative back-up needed also increases. John James Sainsbury opened his first shop in London in 1869 and within fifteen years had multiple branches including one in the then town of Croydon. This was followed by the first branch in the home counties and a new purpose-built headquarters, depot and factory in Blackfriars to manage what was now a rapidly-expanding grocery business. Half a century later it became the first food retailer to computerise the distribution of goods, and half a century on again a new head office – now called a Store Support Centre – was needed. Built within a couple of miles of that first shop, 33 Holborn by Foster & Partners is an eight-storey, mid-rise office block with granite and grey metal framing a glass wedge atrium that rises the full height of the quadrant-shaped building. Inside, a glass staircase hangs from steel rods and a glass floor lights the basement gym, restaurant and auditorium. With this programme and design and a shop included, retail had come full circle when compared to my first example. Maybe it can again.

Two films, made ten years apart. Each is from the disaster genre and as such they share tropes and details: rising disquiet, mass panic, societal breakdown, military involvement, struggling officialdom and the individual odyssey. Both, too, have a broadly understated tone and a relevance for today, even if their subjects are different. I saw them for the first time this week and was struck by both.

Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, written by Scott Z. Burns, is a decade old, a technical and attitudinal lifetime in the film industry and indeed the wider culture yet its exploration of the discovery, impact and outcome of a worldwide pandemic originating in the Far East has an obvious significance as I type this in late May 2021. In fact the sheer degree of specificity in that context is shocking – discussion of the disease’s R number and mortality rate, countermeasures including “social distancing” and the search for, timescale to approve and challenges of supplying a vaccine, this last including the haves and the have-nots. The tension between information from the authorities versus that from an internet conspiracy theorist is also remarkably present for contemporary viewers. Firm emphasis on the trials of those in power and especially the global scientific effort to halt the spread finds a sympathetic audience in light of recent events, the stripped-down quality of dedication and desperation further resonates.

Structurally there is a measured use of flashback in a way that enhances the story, not least at the very end, and the message is cautiously optimistic even if a handshake is presented as a gesture both positive and negative. All of this is well caught by an impressive cast deployed in unshowy and realistic fashion that extends the approach used in, say, Outbreak (1995). Their characters’ fates are revealed in the same way.

Ric Roman Waugh’s Greenland, written by Chris Sparling, had to sacrifice its theatrical release due to the current real-world pandemic, providing one link to the earlier film. Others arise from the slow unfolding of its own fictional catastrophe, the government’s attempts to respond and the results of both. Differentially, though, the crisis itself – the impact of a “planet-killer” comet – cannot be ameliorated and the focus here is squarely on a single family and their journey. This is winningly mounted and intensified in early scenes by a relentless imminence that is drip-fed through television news bulletins, radio broadcasts and – initially and most effectively – ‘Presidential alert system’ messages on mobile phones. Impressively the screenplay resists connecting the head of the family with the government in any way, explaining his bemusement at being selected for safeguarding and rendering him a true everyman during what follows.

This first act culminates in a powerful sequence at a military air base that smartly inverts an equivalent in World War Z (2013) with humans, very much alive, as the enemy horde. Plot twists grow wholly believably from this to set up the second act in which, inevitably, the family members are separated. Indeed what happens to the wife and son afterwards is genuinely shocking within the context of what is still a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster and surprisingly affectingly drawn by the cast, whilst the father’s quest is tainted by his own atavism. An un-signposted cameo brings another homely dimension.

Disasters do happen, and we are living through one. Fictionalised versions – no matter how unlikely – help us anticipate before the fact and analyse afterwards. Stay safe.

The disconcerting new scheme to open up the old Daily Express Building to the public but also engulf it in a towering pastiche of itself proves that Fleet Street can still generate stories decades after the last newspaper left. Front page news in the Architects’ Journal on Thursday, the property trade press carried the item two weeks ago whilst popular outlets such as the Evening Standard have covered it not at all. As ever, reading beyond the headlines adds detail and a bit of investigative journalism reveals much more.

Developer CO-RE, acting for owners Chinese Estates, have announced a goal of “renovation and opening to the public of the Grade II* listed Daily Express” by 2025 along with “complete redevelopment of the existing River Court building”, the large banking offices erected next door and behind the historic Art Deco block in 2000. Both were occupied by Goldman Sachs before they relocated recently. The Daily Express lobby will be used to showcase the history of the building and the writing, publishing, print and communication industry it was once part of, with “cultural tenants” invited for the upper floors. Architects Bjarke Ingles Group (shortening, highly appropriately, to BIG) have designed an even larger building than River Court to satisfy the second part of the plan, to feature the usual contemporary benefits of roof terraces, cycle facilities and flexible floorplates for multiple occupiers as well as increased natural ventilation. Its appearance, we are told, will “respond to the context of nearby buildings and environmental constraints. In particular, the horizontally-banded façade on Fleet Street will be sympathetic and make reference to the Daily Express building”.

Before analysing what this actually means, a bit of history…

The Daily Express building was completed in 1932 to designs by Owen Williams, an engineer not an architect but one who nevertheless crafted the visual appearance as well as the structure of the Dorchester Hotel, the first Wembley stadium, the Boots factory in Nottingham and bridges across the country. On Fleet Street his reinforced concrete portal frames created the space for the basement printing presses that made the entire project viable yet also yielded the building’s exterior finish since the material – distinctively radiused at the corners – was to be left exposed, with windows mounted flush. The small but vital change that occurred before construction, whereby the glazing was brought forward of the concrete which was in turn clad in opaque, black Vitrolite, has been attributed variously to Williams himself, newspaper specialist Bertram Gallanaugh of associate architects Ellis & Clarke and Express owner Lord Beaverbrook. Regardless, the resulting treatment was genuinely ground-breaking and admired by professionals and the public, who were welcomed inside Robert Atkinson’s dazzling lobby with its twinned murals of Empire and Industry, chromed sunburst ceiling and Betty Joel furniture to place small ads, read the paper and conduct related business.

Victorian buildings to the east prevented Williams from finishing his block with a second full-height curved corner; forty years later these were swept way for Aitken House, a much-needed extension, but this further subverted the original design intent by butting hard up against Williams’ work at its lower levels and subsuming his curved top storey corners within its resolutely flat frontage. And since this was clad with horizontal bands of Vitrolite in crude mimicry of the Daily Express (the fenestration of the two were not even aligned), that building even lost its existing autonomy as a vertical pavilion, as architectural writer Ken Powell describes it.

Another twenty years passed and the changing face of the newspaper industry led to the Express group vacating the ‘Black Lubyanka’ for Southwark, leaving Williams’ building lost within further extensions to the north and, when found, tired and empty. The furniture had gone from the lobby along with chromium snake stair handrails and even the floor of linoleum ‘ocean’ waves, other spaces were subdivided and a new use seemed elusive.

Fortunately this sorry situation coincided with the rash of ‘groundscraper’ developments driven by late-80s banking deregulation, and eventually a buyer and a plan emerged. Aitken House and the rear ranges would be demolished in favour of a large new block capable of housing the desired trading floors and associated functions. In accordance with City planning policy, the Williams building would be restored and sensitively integrated so as to form a new complex occupying the same wedge-shaped island site the Express once held.

In 2000, then, Hurley, Robertson and Associates working for then owners The Fleet Street Partnership carried out this scheme which included rescuing and in fact completing Williams’s design.

The original lobby floor pattern was reinstated in durable terrazzo, the snakes recreated from photographs and – highly ingeniously – the lift shafts, now too small, were sealed and employed as air vents and service risers. The décor was refreshed and repaired and all of the glass replaced by thermally and acoustically efficient double glazed equivalents whose appearance was rigorously matched to the originals. In an accommodating touch the new client allowed the vertical metal ‘EXPRESS’ logos framing the entrance to remain on show even if, in later years, a discreet and literal veil was drawn over the windows themselves, suppressing views of the lobby including the much larger and more explicit advertisements of the previous tenant on its rear walls. It was also persuaded that Williams’s concrete frames should remain visible inside, after accreted suspended ceilings and the like were removed, anticipating the current trend for such things.

On the plot occupied by Aitken House a frontage for the new building was needed, and HRA partner in charge John Robertson deemed it essential that this should stand apart from the Daily Express both physically and aesthetically so as to emphasise it.

A deep recess between the two buildings, emulating St Bride’s Avenue opposite and leading to the formal entrance of the combined complex, achieved the former and an all-glass façade was conceived to address the latter. Planners, however, directed the use of stone here in recognition of the surrounding conservation area, criticised by some as regressive yet in its final form (white, rectilinear) the quiet inverse of the Daily Express (black, rounded) and so letting Williams' work shine. Vitally, too, a completely new curved corner was finally added to the east, “creating a clear divide between old and new” and allowing “the separate identity of this key 1930s building [to be] elegantly reinforced” (Powell).

Now, after another twenty years, we are told that HRAs work needs to be revisited and in places undone.

At the Williams building, the pre-planning consultation on the proposals (which ended yesterday and whose website is neither mentioned on, let alone linked to from, CO-RE’s own site) asks the leading question ‘Is restoration a good idea?’ It’s certainly possible for even the best restoration work to need attention after so long, but the lack of any condition report means it’s simply not possible to answer. Reopening the lobby to the public and indeed widening access to the building as a whole for talks, exhibitions and creative events – a rooftop garden is also intended – is commendable and fits with the repurposing of Holborn Bars, the former home of the Prudential, and Pearl Assurance (now the Rosewood Hotel) in nearby Holborn, for example.

Far more worrying is the BIG building, as it were (it will be renamed 120 Fleet Street). Of course it’s always easy to puncture the surface of press releases to deflate the bombast, but CO-RE’s seems particularly vulnerable to such probing. Its assertion that retention of the existing, double-height Williams basement – a given in the City anyway these days for obvious reasons of cost, practicality and sustainability – will “reduce the impact of redevelopment” is thus a little hard to believe when said scheme will have almost three times the floor count of the Daily Express and be more than fifty percent taller. This is clear in a simple comparison of a photograph of the rear of River Court today and a CGI of the new block.

But the real problem with this scheme is its blunt and frankly baffling reversal of the considered work done in 2000 to centre and celebrate the Daily Express.

We are told that the BIG design process “investigated all options”, particularly taking into account “improving the setting of the listed Daily Express”, and that “in a direct homage to its neighbour, the façade on 120 Fleet Street plays tribute to [that] forward thinking design”.

What in truth this labouring has produced is a facile, even crass emulation of the Williams block once more, as if the last twenty years had never happened. Worse, it is to wrap the entirety of the new building with no relief whatsoever. Combined with its dominating scale, this ensures Owen Williams’s building will again be lost in obvious opposition to common sense and the stated desire to recognise the “finer grain” of neighbouring buildings and “the separation of 120 Fleet Street from the Daily Express”. Replicating that unique original Fleet Street entrance signage on one of the new elevations just adds insult to injury. Unsurprisingly the consultation portal does NOT invite comments on this portion of the scheme.

To be fair said separation is also to be achieved by turning HRA’s recessed, simulated alleyway into an actual arcade leading from Fleet Street, around the back of the Daily Express and into Shoe Lane. It will be lined with the usual retail. This, too, is a good idea and aligns with the provision of similar small passageways in a range of current schemes.

In terms of the overall scheme, though, it remains entirely unclear as to why so damaging a move is even being thought of let alone applied for. Planning policy and planners’ tastes change too over time, but it is to be strongly hoped that this awful idea is comprehensively rejected when that happens. Otherwise, given the unwelcome City of London Law Courts project going ahead across the road, the Street of Shame will be living up to its nickname even today.

Twenty years on, director Ridley’s Scott’s Gladiator (2000) is still acclaimed for its textured visuals of ancient Rome, background for a drama involving the actual historical figures of aging Emperor Marcus Aurelius and his decadent, capricious son Commodus. From the cold forests of Germania to the stony grandeur of the Forum, and from the lush silks of Imperial wives to the ghastly splendour of Legionary combat, this design work was hailed as fresh and original for its dark palette and sombre overtones. Yet director Anthony Mann’s much less recognised The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) not only addressed the same characters but did so using a style that is astonishingly similar to Scott’s epic, from the black-hued armour to the Fascistic imagery.

Arguably the most striking correspondence between the two films is also the first to be encountered; an early opening battle in a snowy wood against barbarian tribes. In both cases near-monochrome cinematography – hailed as a first when seen in Scott’s film, which arrived only a few years after Spielberg’s bleached Saving Private Ryan (1998) – sees the Romans’ armour rendered dull, almost black, and in both the snowflakes fly and torches burn. This is clear in both close-ups and distant shots.

Back in Rome, the centre of the Empire is again depicted in cool, distant style for the most part. Scott’s inspiration was Nazi architecture and its representation in propaganda films, and his concepts were realised with CGI. Mann used the traditional equivalent, the matte painting on glass, for his establishing shots but seems to have chosen an allied aesthetic.

In contrast the principal female character, Marcus Aurelius’s daughter Lucilla, appears in rich, warmly-toned costume in many scenes, whether played by Connie Nielsen or Sophia Loren. Yet both actresses have their moment of froideur too, when once again black or near-black serves to symbolise the hollow power of a declining regime.

The increasingly unhinged Commodus’s martial fantasies, of combat in the field or the arena, are also indicated by a shift to black and an emphasis on arms and armour. The glories of past rulers, which gave him the forces he commands, are seen only in the flashes of silver and gold.

Finally, both films let the extravagance for which Rome was known come to the fore when needed, whether in Scott’s Imperial ‘box’ at the Colosseum or Mann’s Capitoline Wolf behind the Emperor. Each is based on real architectural features, exaggerated or modified to suit the needs of the story. Sic transit gloria mundi.

It started with our chance find together – at the bottom of a drawer in my mother’s house – of a slipcase of visitor information cards for the Museum of London dating from its opening in 1976. I had never seen it before, despite living in the same home for three decades; it was designed by David Stuart and illustrated by John Gorham. But as I delighted in its elegant and unusual layout and wondered how on earth it got there*, I realised that certain other items quietly present on my own bookshelves all had the same distinctive quality – the very specific design style of non-fiction publishers in the 1970s.

Several came to mind: a book on the history of weapons, another on historic European town houses, trade magazines issued by an oil company… all shared the same elegant and powerful visual language. Clean typefaces, often in large fonts. Bold illustrations, whether line, axonometric or pictorial, were always isolated against the white space of the page. Flat planes of colour were common, with contrasting hues often employed to highlight a mechanism, design or feature. Even the tactility of the paper played its part, with selected sections in a different weight or colour to carry a different style of image or type of content.

The military book is The Lore of Arms by William Reid, published in 1976 by AB Nordbok, Gothenburg and designed by Tommy Berglund. It is, frankly, gorgeous and contains not a single photograph. Instead drawings of armour, flintlocks, swords and pistols jump off the pages, in various scales, some cutaway, some in profile. Many are in monochrome but many are rendered as exquisite blocks of colour through what the jacket calls a process of hand lithography, the latter a printing method, now widespread, that uses a flat rather than an incised or raised plate with the image formed from a medium that repels water. A bit of Googling reveals that my book was part of a series; other entries covered trains and ships, images from the latter confirming the style.

The house book is (East) German – Town Houses of Europe by Horst Büttner and Günter Meissner – and is from 1983 but the approach is similar with its delightful, hand drawn plans and elevations. By this time there are colour photographs albeit corralled into separate bound sections.

The origins of the approach seen in these books appears to lie in the International Typographic Style, which began in the USSR, Holland and Germany between the wars and matured in Switzerland during the 1950s. Sans-serif types, an underlying mathematical grid and self-assured use of colour images were its attributes, and some of this is seen in those magazines I mentioned. They have no inscribed date of publication or copyright, oddly, but a little more online research confirms my issues of Air BP Magazine (‘The Journal of the International Aviation Service of BP’) are from the mid-to-late 1960s. Their headline text is sometimes vertical, sometimes diagonal and often pushed to the very edge of the page, and there is a delightful – often playful – mix of visual material within each edition, from striking photography to charming illustrations. Especially notable is the synthesis of the physical, such as short internal flyleaves in a different paper.

The same angles are also characteristic of architectural and other design-led periodicals of the era, including – I recalled – my May 1971 copy of The Architectural Review focusing on Venice. This features gloss paper for its photography sections but a quarter of a dozen different colours of a rougher, matte stock for its text and illustrations. A dramatic landscape-format cover sends its own message(s). The edition is almost identical in layout to The Lore of Arms from just five years later, contextualising the design of those weighty tomes and pushing the ideas contained forward to the 1980s.

Thinking back, my interest in graphic design must have started when my father used to bring books like these home for me from the library next to my mother’s workplace; books on space exploration, military fortifications, emergency vehicles. Highly illustrated with impressive cutaways, intricate line drawings and coloured diagrams, sometimes arranged as foldouts, and I pored over them endlessly.

Unfortunately if inevitably trends in this industry, as in so many others, changed, and books became almost entirely full of conventional photography, bled to the edges of the pages and with dull, unremarkable typography. Only Dorling Kindersley carried on the concepts from the 1960s and 70s with their splendid books from the 1990s and 2000s that pushed the punchy technique of knolling, whereby multiple related objects are arranged in a tight grid and photographed from above, like the parts from a model kit.

Decades on from the 1970s, though, it’s clear that my exposure to the style of that period embedded that has stayed with me to this day.

*I visited the newly-opened museum with my primary school; I do remember the impression Powell & Moyer’s mysterious, dark building had on me, with its Lord Mayor’s coach ‘floating’ just above the ground, so we assume the slipcase must have somehow come home with me from then.

The intended height of the courthouse in the planned City of London Law Courts scheme has been reduced by over a metre. Both the Victorian Society and Heritage England have lodged objections to the size and scale of the new building, but it seems to have been complaints about the reduction of daylight to the flats opposite the court that swung the axe.

Actually the old Daily Telegraph building sits immediately across the street, but it wasn’t the bankers that cried foul. Instead it was the owners and occupier of the apartments in the upper levels of the buildings to its west, a nicely varied run of narrow, period frontages of the sort that typify the Street, that stood up to be counted. As a result of some detailed analysis, the parapet of the courthouse has been lowered by 1.2 metres and two rooftop elements of the massing of the block have been cut back to lessen the impact, as shown above.

The amenity societies’ criticism is quite trenchant, saying “The proposed new buildings entirely fail to reflect the characteristic scale and grain of the historic built environment” and that its “articulation is weak, and does nothing to reduce the impression of overbearing monumental bulk”. I hate to say I told you so, but… They are also both unhappy at the proposed loss of historic fabric, namely the demolition of all of the existing buildings along the Fleet Street side of the site and some in Salisbury Square.

As it happens there are rumblings down below, too, with the owners of the building to the south east of the overall development objecting to the proximity of the commercial block to theirs and the servicing arrangements, which would have required them to fall in with the shared basement. The building lines have been adjusted and a new access point created, separate from that supporting the court, police and office development itself.

Evenin’ all.