The London Ambler

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The London Ambler

Architectural walking tours bringing to life the many episodes, sagas and adventures of built and un I hope to join another walk soon.’ – Caro Stanleyl, London

Weaving unexpected and alternative routes through the city and tackling big architectural stories in an authoritative, yet accessible way, the London Ambler brings to life the many episodes, sagas and adventures of built and unbuilt London. With all walks devised and led by Mike Althorpe, an architectural historian, researcher and urban explorer with a passion for the greatest city on earth, The L

ondon Ambler is about mixing it up and exploring architecture with fresh eyes, new perspectives and sound footwear! FOLLOW ME

To find out about walks happening in 2016 check out the links below, follow me online or talk to me direct via email – all tours are repeated at regular intervals and available for private or group booking. Twitter
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Email [email protected]

TESTIMONIALS

‘The Marylebone and Mayfair walk was thoroughly captivating. Having lived and worked in the area for many years, I was interested to see if Mike could offer any new insights – and boy, did he! His expertise ranges across history, architecture, culture and social history, and his easy way with storytelling makes him an entertaining walking companion.’ – Katie Puckrik, London

‘I learnt a lot and saw many places I’ve never seen before, which is all I ask of a London walk.

24/07/2025

LISTEN NOW!….The London Ambler on the Open City pod! 👂🎧💥🌆

Last week The London Ambler took to the airwaves (does anyone say that now?) and guested on Open City’s news pod ‘The Brief’ with Sahiba Chadhha .

We talked architecture festivals, pedestrianisation in the West End, nightclubs, new skyscrapers in The City, demolition in MK and my new book with ‘Dual Cities - Social Housing in London and New York’ and I even managed to squeeze in a quote from my hero Ian Nairn! 💪

👉LISTEN NOW AND CATCH UP WITH MY FRESH TAKES AND ALL THE ARCHiTECTURE GOS’ AT THE LINK IN THE BIO!👈

23/07/2025

Inventory Brutalism.

The spectacular facade and deck fragment of Robin Hood Gardens as seen in its new setting amidst the extraordinary context of the V&A East Storehouse, a stunning inventory of art and design that opened in 2025 and designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) and described by as ‘like the actual manifestation of an architecture uni project.’

Created in 1972, Robin Hood Gardens was a council estate designed by architects Alison and Peter Smithson for the Greater London Council (GLC) in Poplar, Tower Hamlets and was significant as the architects only realised ‘streets in the sky’ project and consisted of two galleries of articulated concrete slab blocks of stacked flats and maisonettes organised around a green.

Encircled by urban motorways the project suffered immediately due to its isolated setting and later from sustained neglect and decay. Despite its generous layouts and innovative organisation and popularity with some tenants, the estate proved problematic and was demolished in phases between 2017-25 for redevelopment as mixed tenure housing.

The storehouse fragment was acquired by the V&A in 2018 and exhibited at the Venice Biennale during the same year alongside evocative films by Korean artist Do Ho Suh.

Its presence in the storehouse is somewhat bitter-sweet. It is an incredibly powerful and awe inspiring piece, but also tragic in its abstraction and demise as actual social housing.

01/07/2025

Dockers Anglican.

The rugged polychromatic neo-gothic drama of St Peter’s Church and clergy offices in Wapping. Created in phases from 1865-6, this rough diamond of high Anglicanism was designed by architect F. H. Pownall as a mission and its creation followed years of fundraising.

The purpose of the complex - like many other missions across mid 19th century London - was to provide religious moral teaching for the tough dockside community, but St Peter’s also went on to provide local social welfare, evening classes and served as a hostel for homeless girls.

Caught in an urban island shaped and cut off from the rest of the city by the Thames and the vast bodies of water that make up the old London Docks, Wapping was a frontier town and its dense and haphazard fabric defined by the needs of shipping, heavy industry and warehousing and marked by overcrowding, poverty and decay.

Appealing to a multicultural and transient local population, one time clergyman Charles Fuge Lowder would stage processions, rituals and pageants in the streets outside to rally followers, hugely popular spectacles that were challenged by the Church of England authorities for their strongly Catholic associations.

Bombed during WW2, the complex was partially rebuilt during the postwar years at a time when the urban fabric that it was once embedded within was completely erased leading to its strange exposed ogre-like form outside and its mix of delicate and brutal, light and heavy drama inside.

26/06/2025

Tragi-Goth.

The rose pink granite and glossy marble peaks of Minster Court at the heart of The City of London. Created between 1987-93 by architects Gollins Melvin and Ward Partnership, this compelling complex is one of the City’s most distinct and gutsy office complexes.

Conceived amidst the shockwaves of the financial sector’s ’Big Bang’ deregulatory boom, the project is unique in adopting a fantastically committed all over post modern Neo Gothic outfit - with three buildings organised around a glazed open courtyard and united by sequences of arches, arcades, gables, mansards, spires and turrets - like a pumped up priory or high corporate vestry.

The tongue in cheek, fanciful, yet deadly serious and high quality complex played panto villain in 1996 when it featured as the fictional HQ of Cruella de Vil’s in Disney’s live action 101 Dalmatian’s, but is now, alas, cast as tragic hero and impending doom haunts its turrets.

In a scheme led by architects Wilkinson Eyre, Minster Court will shortly undergo a comprehensive retrofit that will completely destroy the spirited gothic character of its main buildings, reducing them back to their concrete frames and re-imagining them simply as sustainable exemplars.

The combination of tragedy and the gothic genre is a powerful and enduring form of story telling, so perhaps it was always inevitable. Nonetheless, in coming years one of the City’s most original and wonderfully weird landmarks will be lost forever.

💀🏹💥😔💪📖

25/06/2025

‘Gentlemanly’ Exchange.

The smart ‘Adamish’ exterior of Boodles Club, a ‘gentlemen’s’ club at the heart of St James.

Created 1775-76 by country house architect John Crunden for the private members gambling den established in 1762, the building represents the second stage of the club house as a distinct architectural typology in London.

The first stage of the club was the rented room at the back of the tavern or coffee house and the third (and final) stage the great palazzo of Pall Mall.

In between these states Boodles is the second phase and consists of a brown brick Neo-classical town house, or implied pair of townhouses, with two Tuscan porches (one without a door) balancing a symmetrical composition anchored on a pedimented middle and large Venetian window with arched fan, inspired by the contemporary work of Robert Adam.

During the 1960s, Boodles was jolted into a new architectural role when the cluster of buildings to its immediate south were taken down and between 1960-64 remade as The Economist Plaza by architects Alison and Peter Smithson.

In this process the club’s gable wall - hidden from view for 200 years - was suddenly exposed to the emerging public plaza. To reconcile things, Boodles became the fourth element - or second player - in the scheme and it gained a new facade with a double height bay window module setting up a conversation with the chamfered forms of the adjacent modernist three volumes - the smallest of which directly takes its cue from the clubs proportions and scale.

A new game from an old card deck. Urbane and suave. 1762 to 1964 in one move! ♠️

19/06/2025

Festivalen Stad.

If London and its 8.8 million citizens had a common room, a place where everyone could crash and feel kinda at home, it would be the Royal Festival Hall.

Created between 1948-51, this smooth skinned concert hall was a gift to the city and built by the London County Council (LCC) with a design headed by Robert Matthew and J L Martin with Peter Moro.

Conceived as a civic venue ‘to which London and Europe should look as an example of English modern architecture at its best and as a well-tubed instrument for orchestras and conductors of international repute’ it was the only building of the Festival of Britain designed to be permanent.

Despite the ‘English’ ambitions, its fresh and clean sweeping modernist design owes much to Scandinavia, while its organisation is based on an ‘egg in a box’ concept, with the double-skinned auditorium at its heart held aloof by pilotti and buffered by wide stairs, landings and foyers on all sides.

It’s a grade 1 building today, but perhaps more significant than fabric is the social programme and attitude of openness it incubates, a legacy of the Greater London Council’s (GLC) ‘Open Foyer Policy’ under Ken Livingstone in 1983 that promoted democratic access to the site and radically extended its opening hours well beyond the 1.5 hours before concert start time into a full time social hub.

You might never see a concert at this place in your life and you know what??!…it kinda doesn’t matter. It’s also privately owned today (via a charitable trust since 1988) but still instinctively belongs to us all.

Interior images from Ribapix.

17/06/2025

Sink Full.

The spectacular maritime pop of Shadwell Basin, Maynard’s and Newland’s Quay.

Created between 1986-88 and designed by architects MacCormac, Jamieson Prichard & Wright these colourful postmodern housing terraces are together one of the most potent icons of London’s Docklands and were created in the years when the vast landscapes of the old docks were up for grabs under the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC).

Playfully rifting on 19th warehouse forms, Venetian palazzos - and with references to Liverpool’s celebrated Albert Dock ensemble - the project reinvents the old dock basin originally created 1828-32 as part of the expansion of the London Dock system between Wapping and the old Ratcliff Highway.

Today this striking and fun group is grade II listed. 💪

👉Discover more about the LDDC and the transformation of Docklands this Saturday 21 June with a walk around the making of Canary Wharf - BOOK NOW VIA LINKS IN BIO!👈

28/05/2025

Pre-Post Modern Folk(ish)

Or something. The multilayered and varied boxy forms of the St Katherine’s Estate on the edge of St Katherine’s Dock, Wapping.

Created between 1975-77 and designed by architects Renton Wood Howard, as an extension to the 1930s original next door, this was the look of new (public) housing in the revitalised Docklands in the days before it became Thatcher’s mega project.

Led by the Greater London Council (GLC) the estate’s design is a great example of low rise, high density, an approach that swept through British housing during the 1970s and sought to create purposefully nuanced modern alternatives to the banality of postwar tower-slab formulas.

The estate’s interlinked planted courtyards are based on layouts the architects developed earlier in the decade across town at the mighty Earlstoke Estate in Clerkenwell.

Similarly at St Katherine’s there are stacked maisonettes, ziggarated towers and raised decks and highwalks, but also attempts to rift on the local (real and unreal) vernacular with use of yellow stock bricks and the inclusion of weatherboarded projecting upper storeys, implying a maritime folk of a kind.

Had the GLC been allowed (and was funded) to complete its plans, the estate would have been next door to a new station on the unrealised Fleet tube Line to Thamesmead (completed elsewhere as the Jubilee Line).

21/05/2025

Kennington Grace.

In any other city the enormous proportions of Kennington Park Road in South London would have warranted avenue or boulevard status and there would be a series of huge monuments at key points creating axial precincts and massive rond points.

But, it being London it is lined with no less epic, but essential humble and mostly ordinary plain brick terraces created en spec’ from the 1780s as the modern metropolis and its merchant classes lept into the space and clean air of Surrey - te****le like - along London’s arterial roadways.

The great exception to this uniform urban scene are the fantastic Nos 126 and 128 two matching pairs of semi-detached houses with gable ends and split lunette windows at their attic level created in 1788 by local developer William Ingle, a builder based in nearby Newington. Since 1879, the right-hand buildings have been the home of the art school of the City & Guilds of London College.

Together the pair act as a formal gateway to Cleaver Square, setting up a grand and elegant approach to a discreet Georgian Square laid out soon after in 1789 as the first square south of the river and that is today one boule removed from a town square in Provence!….easy to miss as the peloton masses hurtle to and from Clapham, but an ordinary oasis of early urban gentility!

Map of 1813. Third image from Lambeth Archives.

20/05/2025

Brick Knuckle.

Packing a punch in the back streets of Clare Market and the hinterlands of Lincoln’s Inn Field and Kingsway, this is the glorious brick expressionism of the LSE Saw Swee Hock Student Centre.

Created in 2014 and designed by architects O’Donnell Tuomey, this dazzling multifunctional building - housing music venue, pub, learning cafe, union offices, prayer centre, dance studio, careers library and gym - is located at a convergent point of the LSE campus described by the architects as an urban ‘knuckle-point.’

Featuring a series of converging, escalating and swooping geometric volumes its varied and relaxed form is all about pulling focus, drawing in and creating assembly with pattern-rich warm brick and timber rifting on back street heritage types nearby.

The modern LSE campus sits almost wholly upon the site of the old Clare Market and the last fragments of a network of 17th and 18th century streets that grew up behind Lincoln’s Inn from the 1660s and which narrowly survived complete erasure between 1897-1905 and the creation of the Kingsway Aldwych urban improvement.

19/05/2025

Mid century Tyburnia.

Continuity and radicalism through the cosy streets, sweeping crescents and soaring high rise of the mid century Hyde Park Estate on the southern edge of Paddington.

Part of the near comprehensive reinvention of what was the old Bishops of London or Church Commisioners estate, these modernist terraces and towers, flats, maisonettes and compact townhouses were masterplanned by architect Anthony Monoprio and built out between 1957-69 mostly by Cecil Elsom of Elsom Pack Roberts.

The buildings stand upon the grand urban framework of the original 1830s Commissioners estate, whose axial masterplan and code for grandiose townhouses and stucco terraces were set out by George Gutch and intended for a wealthy clientele.

By the 1940s however, the area had slipped into decline and commissioners sold off acres of land, rebranded itself as the Hyde Park Estate and took down most of the big old houses to attract back into town a more upwardly mobile, footloose urban dweller…following a model of architecture-led urban regeneration also conceived by The City on the other side of town at the Barbican at the same time.

The new(ish) Tyburnia - colloquial old name linked to the gallows at Marble Arch and now an estate agents favourite - is rather more tame than the brutalist megalopolis across town, but it’s high quality mixed townscape is a reminder of how an old urban framework of open streets and squares can be the prompt for a robust new architecture.

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