Too high, too fast

You have to get nearly halfway through this book before it starts to show some life. Until that point, as Rowan Moore ambles in his wry manner through pages of familiar description of the capital’s built and social history, you find yourself wondering what it is all for. After all, if you choose to write a book about the architecture of London you are putting yourself in some pretty distinguished company.

Ian Nairn, say, whose magnificently off-kilter, beer-goggled 1966 hymn to the city, Nairn’s London, has been reissued as a Penguin Modern Classic to universal acclaim. Or Peter Ackroyd, whose colossal 2001 London: The Biography is drizzled with lazy assumptions but is an eloquent advocate of the city as living organism. Or psycho-geographer-in-chief Iain Sinclair, walking the city to awake its memories. And then there is the author who Moore quotes so often that his estate might dream of retrospective royalties: the Danish academic Steen Eiler Rasmussen, whose London: The Unique City of 1934 (first published in English in 1937) is a key work for architects, if little known by the public.