Summer Term 2023: 23 June, 30 June and 7 July 2023 (3 weeks)
Members: £50. Non-members: £60
Concessions: £10 (call the office 020 8340 3343)
RAILWAY LANDS - Architecture & Reinvention Through Kings Cross St Pancras.
Friday 23 June, 10.30am - 12.30pm
Gateways to the Midlands, the North, Scotland and Europe, Kings Cross St Pancras is an urban landscape like no other. Forged in the railway mania of the 19th century, the two mighty termini with their vast passenger, freight and power infrastructures transformed London forever, leaving behind a legacy of change and upheaval and a spectacular set of monuments to Victorian self-confidence and the railway age. Once plagued by decay and threatened with demolition, this revived rail scene is now a destination; part of a remade urban quarter where media, tech’ and the arts pour out of old warehouses and goods depots and new buildings take their cue from the fragments of heavy industry. In this walk, The London Ambler embarks upon a great railway journey - station to station, travelling through the past, present and future of Kings Cross St Pancras via its best architecture and most compelling urban landscapes.
POWER & PALAZZOS - The Architecture of Old Money
Friday 30 June, 10.30am - 12.30pm
In the 19th century, London was the world’s pre-eminent trading city. Standing at the heart of the burgeoning British Empire, the power house of this operation was The City and its commercial investments extended across the globe. Emulating the prestige of older civilisations, financial institutions used architecture to confirm their status and there emerged a grandiose suite of neo-classical exchanges, palace-style banks and temple-like offices that remade the image of the Square Mile in spectacularly hybridised variations on Athens, Rome, Venice and Florence. Weaving a route between The City’s best surviving 19th and early 20th century commercial palazzos, this walk explores the architecture and ornament of old money, but also its influence and legacy on the modern world today.
THIS IS NOW! - The Architecture of The 21st century City
Friday 07 July, 10.30am - 12.30pm
The Square Mile is London's contemporary architectural playground and a space of perpetual change. Amidst the unlikely framework of the capital's most ancient streets, a suite of ever more dazzling monuments to finance and global commerce reach up and out in a bewildering, awe inspiring and sometimes shocking mix of old and new. From fine-tuned brilliance to thumping mediocrity, this walk explores the evolution of space, style and scale through The City's 21st century additions charting two decades of incredible transformation and ongoing argument.