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London Essay

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With reference to one property development site within the City of London, critically appraise the extent to which that development delivers successful modern property development whilst at the same time respecting the historic sense of identity of the City of London as identified by Glinert.

The City of London sometimes referred to as ‘the square mile’ denotes the area within the original old walled city built by the Romans in about AD50.1 One can still see evidence of roman heritage by visiting the London wall, built in around 200AD or the only roman built amphitheatre, which is located under the Guildhall art gallery. 2 Today the City of London is considered one of the leading international business and financial centres of the …show more content…

A particular building or site distinguishes many cities. For example the Eiffel tower is the symbol for Paris and one may say Buckingham Palace is the symbol for London. This means that a city’s identity can be portrayed through its architecture and I believe that a building like the Lloyds building is not appropriate for the prestigious City of London. The extent to which the Lloyds Building is a modern success can definitely be questioned. One of the aims of locating the ugly serviceable components on the outside is that costs are saved on repairs because everything is accessible. However the cost of cleaning the external steel is so extortionate and frequent that the benefits are outweighed completely. Also, now that it is Grade 1 listed it means alternations are extremely hard to make. The whole point of the design was that the building could be changed and re-ordered like Meccano. This means it can no longer even achieve one of the primary objectives that were in mind when it was built. This is one of the main reasons I believe it does not represent a ‘successful modern property development’. In the summer of 2013 it was reported: ‘The outgoing chief executive of Lloyd’s of London blamed the design of the insurer’s headquarters for its high maintenance costs’ 6and that Lloyds are considering terminating their lease when the next break clause occurs in 2021. With regards to ‘respecting the historic sense of identity’ in

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