In 1864, Fydor Dostoevsky wrote his seminal Notes from Underground, a novella exploring existentialism and alienation in a large city – in his case, St. Petersburg – the premise of which in many ways remains relevant today, now perhaps even more than during his lifetime. Such thoughts recently sprang to mind while riding the London Underground during rush hour. The Tube’s new motto should really be changed to rush, push, crush (see it, say it, sort it is getting a tad tired).
The spectacular city of nine million never ceases to amaze, and my wife and I embarked on our journey with a shortlist of new must-see architecture. Essential to seeing them was navigating the Underground transit system, which can be a bit intimidating, with eleven Tube lines, and light transit like the DLR, Uber boats, and regional trains. A week in London was then followed by a week on the French Riviera, specifically, in belle Nice with all its charms.
As a follow-up to my Notes from Britain, which I penned about eighteen months ago, this latest trip was based in Greenwich, located on the Thames directly south of Canary Wharf. This proved to be the ideal launching point for visiting several new additions to the London scene, including the V&A East Storehouse in London’s east side (located on the site of the 2012 Olympic grounds), and a riverside visit to the newly opened 42-acre Battersea power station redevelopment south of Vauxhall.
The trip also included stops at some of the City’s old vanguards—the National Gallery and the Portrait Gallery on the perimeter of Trafalgar Square, along with a stroll through Leicester Square and Covent Garden. A trip to the Design Museum in Kensington also included a stop at the Leighton House, rounding things off with a day spent in Greenwich itself, home as it is to the Royal Observatory and Naval Academy by Christopher Wren, which contains the exquisite Queen’s House, designed by Inigo Jones in 1616.
Greenwich is also one of the inner-city London boroughs that does not have a Tube station. Instead, it is served by the driverless DLR or Docklands Light Rail, running above ground, extending north and south from the Isle of Dogs. With several stations connecting to multiple Tube lines along the way, the train service opened in 1987 and extends to London’s City Centre airport. It served the 2012 Olympic village in Stratford—whose growing cultural precinct includes the Aquatic Centre by Zaha Hadid—as well as the London Stadium used for the Games’ opening and closing ceremonies, now home to West Ham United FC.
But back to the Tube!
While buildings are themselves destinations, the Tube is literally the journey on which one witnesses a visual cornucopia of humanity and technology, displaying all the latest fashions and trends, social norms and graces, of all ages and ethnicities. In addition to its convenience, the London Underground continues to be a trendsetter, having recently relaunched a new sleek design for the Picadilly train that runs to Heathrow airport. With the train’s new face currently on display at the Design Museum, the rebrand is reminiscent of Thomas Heatherwick’s update on London’s red double-decker bus in 2012.
At Greenwich, the Queen’s House is named for Queen Anne of Denmark, and it is now an art gallery and UNESCO World Heritage site. It is hard to imagine the river’s edge without all its Royal Naval Academy build-up, but that was what the landscape would’ve first looked like to the architect in the early 1600s.
As Inigo Jones’ first commission after a trip through Renaissance Italy, the house’s relation to the landscape, a sprawling garden and park, is like one of Palladio’s villas. Roman, Renaissance, and Palladian influences are on full display throughout, combined with his own English flair seen in the Great Hall and Tulip Stair.
Just up the hill from the Queen’s House is the Royal Observatory, a curious collection of buildings containing a museum on the history of navigation, complete with the world’s first working chronometer, called the H4, along with several working space telescopes— with one setup to look at Saturn. And in its outdoor courtyard, the Greenwich meridian line, complete with a queue of tourists lined up to be photographed with it.
Everything you ever wanted to know and more about how ships navigated the world before lines of longitude were created is on display here, including a black and white photo of the historic conference in 1884, where the Greenwich meridian was universally agreed to be the zero meridian for establishing lines of longitude.
On the shores of the Thames in front of the Queen’s House is the former Royal Navy Hospital and College and current Maritime Museum, alongside a drydocked and carefully preserved Cutty Sark.
The Royal Observatory also turns out to be a perfect viewpoint to look north, back at the Queen’s House, with Wren’s collection of naval college buildings—complete with two cupola-topped towers that frame the square the same as they do for St. Paul’s Cathedral further up the river.
With two hundred years of British architecture lining the riverside, the new shimmering Canary Wharf continues to emerge phoenix-like from the ashes of the abandoned docklands of the 1970s and 80s. New residential towers have been rising for the last two years, and as London’s second Central Business District – in which One Canada Square was once the tallest tower in the UK and Europe – it grows denser every day.
Traveling on the DLR, one realizes that not only are the trains driverless, there are also no attendants at the stations. In many cases, there are not even fare gates. With several zones along the extent of the line, you must be careful not to be charged the cost of entering and exiting at the terminus stations (I learned this the hard way).
The saving grace is that you can easily tap in and out with your credit card, and also simply present it for proof of purchase while on the train. This happened more on the DLR than at any time on the Tube. But we were happy to oblige given that the DLR allowed us to go to Stratford and the Victoria & Albert (V&A) East Storehouse.
Located a bit off the beaten path on the edge of London’s gritty east side, the site was the former home of the BBC during the 2012 Olympics, with the building now a storehouse for over half a million artifacts, including books, coins, fabrics and tapestries.
Along with the Natural History Museum and Victoria & Albert Museum, the East Storehouse takes its place with the new Dundee V&A, which opened in 2018, and a new Stratford museum set to open in Spring 2026. With its curatorial activities on full display as a working environment, the building has also provided dedicated space for five special exhibits, including small breakout theater spaces for video testimonials.
These include the recreation of a Frank Lloyd Wright office interior, designed for his Fallingwater client Edgar Kaufmann, and the reconstruction of a delicate 15th-century chapel ceiling from Toledo. The V&A has also recreated the Frankfurt kitchen by Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (also on display at the Design Museum), and preserved a section of the facade of Peter and Alison Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens housing development, featuring one of the building’s interior hallways.
If that wasn’t enough, it includes glass floors to see curatorial activities below. A large side gallery has also been set up to display a three-story high Picasso painting Le Train Bleu. Painted by Alexander Prince Schervashidze in 1924 as a curtain for the Russian Ballet, it has rarely been on display, given its size at 10 m x 11 m. And most amazing of all is the price of admission, which, like most museums and galleries in London, is free!
This is also the case for the Design Museum in Kensington, close to Holland Park, and just west of central London, which has been at its current digs since 2016. Having previously been located in a refurbished warehouse on the banks of the Thames for some twenty-five years, it is a must see for architects and designers alike.
Now in a purpose-built building designed by John Pawson, the three-story structure features a generous central atrium, with three main exhibition spaces, and is worth the visit alone for the main exhibit on the uppermost floor, Designer Maker User.
Just a few steps away from the Design Museum is the Leighton House, an Arts and Crafts architectural gem built in the time of Lutyens, Webb, and Shaw, designed for the painter Sir Fredric Leighton of Flaming June fame. With the extents of his house on display, including the studio where he painted, the house is also a gallery of many of his great works, along with Greek and Roman statuary that were the sources of his inspiration—including the Arab Hall that could be from the Alhambra.
The final leg of our week-long tour of London was an Uber boat ride along the Thames, traveling from Greenwich to the Battersea Power Plant development and back.
Taking about one hour and costing the equivalent of a day pass for the Tube, one can see Canary Wharf, St. Paul’s and the CBD, the Tate Modern and Shard, pass under the London and Millennium Bridges, pass by the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and Vauxhall before arriving at the site of the old power plant.
The transformation of the old building and site is nothing short of miraculous, given its state as an industrial wasteland when it was decommissioned in 1983. It took until 2010 for a viable master plan to materialize (by the late Rafael Vinoly), along with the Malaysian development company to finance it, with construction starting in 2013. In 2022 the old power plant itself—one of eight phases planned for the 42-acre site—finally opened to the public. It now consists of a shopping mall at its base, with office, hotel, and residential space above.
Overseen by Wilkinson Eyre, who were given the daunting task of preserving what they could of the old station while providing for the new mixed-use program, the new public realm was filled with people when we visited on a Saturday. Although it weaves together movie theatres and a rec room arcade to animate the turbine hall spaces after the shops closed, the heaviest lifting was done by the central Control Room B bar and lounge, which, along with providing a vantage point to people watch, also had the original control panels from the power plant on display.
After the hustle and bustle of a big city, flying an hour and a half to the French Riviera was a welcome change. We welcomed the sea air and warm sunshine that is the hallmark of the Côte d’Azur, even in October.
Nice, named for the Greek goddess Nike around 370 BC, is also home to Terra Amata, an archaeological site dating back some 380,000 years. The city has several Medieval and Roman archaeological sites, including a Roman bath site next to the city’s Museum of Archaeology. After a couple of days in the Mediterranean sun, it was clear to me why people had been coming here to live and vacation since time immemorial.
The area, I also discovered, was where Friedrich Nietzsche spent six winters—in nearby Eze, writing his Thus Spoke Zarathustra—and where Marc Chagall and Henri Matisse lived and painted. Picasso also took up a brief residence in nearby Antibes.
With a population of 345,000 residents, the seaside resort town of Nice swells to over 3 million in the summer (at least according to our E-bike tour guide). A melting point of the Mediterranean—French, Spanish, Italian, and Greek cultures mingle, including some Russian—it is home to the impressive St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral. Staying in either Old Nice or the Coeur de Nice, one is easily able to walk to the 113-year-old cathedral, with several museums also within walking distance, including the Matisse Museum and Chagall Museum.
But without a doubt, the most exhilarating way to see the Côte d’Azur is by E-bike, at least if you have a tour guide like the one we were fortunate enough to have.
With a small shop located close to the Chagall Museum at an intersection of inner-city bike routes, our tour guide was able to get us quickly to the bike lanes along the beachfront, providing the launching point to a two-hour ride up the hills to the east of the city.
By the end of the trip, we would have biked close to 50 km, finishing with spectacular views from the top of a medieval castle site at Eze, with the final stop at the Fort de la Revère, reaching an elevation close to 700 m above sea level.
With a quaint civic square, complete with a Mediterranean colour palette of reds and oranges, the main street through the town center has two streetcars but is otherwise a pedestrian domain. It includes a massive checkboard tiled square where the central shopping arcade intersects with the Promenade d’Anglais and the waterfront.
All combined, Nice is one of Europe’s most walkable cities, with the requisite bars and restaurants, markets and buskers that one would expect to find. Nice’s central train station also connects seamlessly with the nearby airport, along with Monaco and Italy to the east, and Marseille and Barcelona to the west.
Much as Bath had proved to be the panacea to our trip to London last year, Nice provided a complement to our week in Greenwich this year. With a rich collection of sights and stops, I also managed to return with a small library of books, including ones on Battersea and the Leighton House.
At the Tate Modern gift shop, a new Wallpaper produced book called London Architecture included some places we had already visited, along with ones I’d never thought to have visited.
And much of the trip—as invariably happens—was about getting occasionally lost, and using our wits (and Smart devices!) to find our way back to our hotel room.
One such moment, along the River Lea in Hackney, complete with canal boats and graffiti-filled back alleys, was one we would laugh at later, fondly recalling getting lost 7,500 km away from home. Certainly, thinking back about it now, I would highly recommend it.
***
Sean Ruthen is a Metro Vancouver-based architect.
