ABSTRACT
During the last decade of the twentieth century, English cities underwent a series of astonishing, sometimes bizarre transformations. Against a backdrop of public squalor, these long-decayed and inward-looking conurbations became self-consciously spectacular, juxtaposing extraordinary wealth with equally extraordinary poverty, modernity with the ruins of the past, urban sophistication with entropic decay. The means of making these contrasts was architecture, in the form of new museums, public spaces and monuments. Such architectural spectacles provided agreeable settings in which to enjoy coffee, food and shopping, and, superficially at least, seemed of benefit to those with the time and money to enjoy them. These people also discovered the pleasures of urban wandering, and they aspired to live in increasingly vertiginous glass high rises, whose appearance of technical sophistication spoke of new ways of being in the city.
