ABSTRACT
The bulk of London is housing, and in few cities is housing so consistently distributed across the centre and around its institutions. The predominance of speculative terrace housing with gardens has meant that the city is low to the ground and shoulder to shoulder. To analyse London too much feels unnatural because its urbanism is anti-plan. Wandering through the city one can imagine a past landscape of fields, streams and tracks whose geography has determined an urban fabric in which one can never see far down a street and the buildings change regularly. There are parks and churches, factories and warehouses. But unusually for a town, they all front on to the main road, stretched out in a jumbled row, with no precedence given to any of them. The road is wide with useful shops. Its width and length give the road an epic quality with fast traffic, broad pavements and a fantastic variety of commercial uses.
