Rebuilding the City of London in the Age of Deregulated Markets: A Study of Architectural Discourse

by Stephen Rosser

Figure 1. Richard Rogers Partnership. Lloyd’s of London (completed 1986). Photo by the author, 2021.

“Only the Great Fire of London and the Blitz had brought swifter and more comprehensive change to the City’s appearance than Big Bang.”1 That assertion, in a history of 1980s Britain, encapsulates the twin themes at the center of the research project on which I am currently working. The first theme is the deregulation of London’s financial markets which was implemented on a single day—October 27, 1986—and labelled “Big Bang.” This event involved a fundamental change in the operation of Britain’s financial services industry, which in turn transformed the overall character and culture of the City of London and secured its position as one of the world’s three principal financial centers.2 Though not a direct government initiative, Big Bang coincided with the peak years of the Thatcher administration and was seen as reflecting Thatcherite neoliberal deregulatory ideology.

The second theme is the radical reshaping of the City’s built environment, which began in the Big Bang era and involved a succession of large, innovative, and often controversial building projects designed by some of the most prominent architects of the day. That process, which continued into the new millennium and produced the cluster of high-rise office towers which dominate the present-day City skyline, can fairly be regarded as one of the principal episodes in the recent history of British architecture. 

My research explores the discussion and debate by contemporary commentators as well as later historians on the City of London’s architectural development, with its radically new and controversial buildings, in the closing decades of the twentieth century against the background of the newly deregulated, globalized markets of the City.

The research base of the project comprises a wide spectrum of literature relating to the City’s built environment in the period concerned. It encompasses not only material emanating from specialist and academic sources, such as commentary in architectural journals and works of architectural and urban historians, but also the content of wider public debate, most importantly as reflected in the contemporary mainstream news media (including broadcast content).  

I organize the research around case studies centered on four major development projects: a proposed Ludwig Mies van der Rohe office tower in the heart of the City, and, following that scheme’s rejection, the James Stirling-designed building eventually erected on the site; a new headquarters for Lloyd’s of London in a “high-tech” design by Richard Rogers (fig. 1); the redevelopment of Paternoster Square, a prominent site adjacent to St Paul’s Cathedral; and Broadgate, a major development on the City’s northern fringe combining offices with a wide range of amenities and public space (fig. 2).

All four projects have been extensively discussed and argued over both at the time and in retrospect. For example, the new Lloyd’s building made an immediate impact by virtue of its unconventional form and dramatic outline. Given these qualities, and the near concurrence of its opening with the date of Big Bang, Lloyd’s quickly became the architectural project most closely identified with the “new” City of the 1980s (despite the fact that it had been conceived in the previous decade). That connection was quickly taken up by commentators (especially those on the left) as an image for the entire era of Thatcherite politics.3

Figure 2. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Exchange House, Broadgate (completed 1990). Photo by the author, 2021.

Yet it was another of the case studies illustrated here—Broadgate—that seems to emerge most clearly from the discourse as the architectural expression of the Big Bang City. The development was widely noted as one that not only offered a new type of office environment required by deregulated markets and electronic trading, but also provided, in its spaces and amenities, a stage set for Big Bang-era culture and lifestyle. Broadgate was seen to encapsulate, too, the rapid Americanization of the 1980s City, involving as it did high-speed construction techniques developed in the United States and the leading American architectural practice of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

The key questions I am seeking to answer are: How did commentary and debate on contemporary British architecture and urbanism, of which the City of London was becoming a leading showcase, interact with the discourse on global finance? How far were the City’s new buildings and spaces read as in dialogue with the deregulated City? Conversely, was there any suggestion of the opposite effect, i.e., were the buildings seen as influencing the contemporary City, for example in terms of its style of working, attitudes, or overall culture? And given Big Bang’s alignment with Thatcherite deregulatory policies, what part, if any, did the contemporary political environment play in reception of the City’s new developments?

At this stage in my research, I am minded to argue that the City’s late-twentieth century built environment has from the outset been interpreted in some degree as the material expression of deregulated markets, global capital flows, and Thatcherite politics. These connections have been seen as evident in the new type of office buildings involved, the spaces and amenities associated with them, and, in at least some cases, the design values they embodied. Yet, I hypothesize, the discourses surrounding these buildings range well beyond the subjects of contemporary finance and politics to encompass subjects as varied as the City’s history and its role as a focus of national identity, urban form, the state of the building preservation movement, architectural patronage, and the contemporary property development business. We encounter too (particularly in the Mies/Stirling and Lloyd’s cases) an early manifestation of a phenomenon that would become firmly rooted in post-millennium architectural discourse—the notion of the “iconic” or “signature” building designed by an internationally recognized “celebrity” architect.

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Stephen Rosser

Stephen Rosser is a doctoral research student at Birkbeck, University of London. His master’s degree included a dissertation on “new architectural Tories,” a group of late-twentieth century British architectural writers identified with the political right.

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Footnotes

1. Graham Stewart, Bang!: A History of Britain in the 1980s (London: Atlantic Books, 2013), 395.

2. The City of London is a small area (the “Square Mile”) which is both the historic center of the capital and its financial and business district. “The City” also serves as a long-established shorthand for Britain’s financial services industry.

3. See for example Peter Conrad, “Thatcher’s Monuments: Cardboard City,” Observer Magazine, April 23, 1989, 36–8; Stewart, Bang!, 266; Florian Cord, “Capital/Rebel City: London 2012 and the Struggle for Hegemony,” in London Post-2010 in British Literature and Culture, ed. Oliver van Knebel Doeberitz and Ralf Schneider (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2017), 39–56.

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