London's pressing need for parks
London badly needs more housing, but it also needs more parks, particularly where large new areas of high density housing are proposed. This is one of several pressing practical matters that appear to take second place to consideration of the beauty of the city's skyline - which is important too - when the question of tall buildings is discussed. Here is a piece I wrote for the Architects' Journal on this subject, published in the 18 July 2014 issue. ...... London’s ‘tall building problem’ is more to do with planning and urban design than architecture; and for residential towers, but also for office towers, the problem is more to do with density, plot ratio and over-congestion of built form than it is to do with height per se. We want our city to look beautiful, but we also need it to work in a civilised way, and for that we need public space as well as buildings – public space that is not being delivered in most of the tall building projects currently proposed. In Mar...