London Architecture Guide

How to Read Architecture in London

London's 6 architectural styles are dominated by post-war concrete. Here is what to look for when identifying the key directions across the city.

Brutalist

London's signature modern style, with 8 buildings. Raw board-marked concrete, massive sculptural volumes, and repetitive structural bays. The Barbican Estate is the most complete example — a self-contained city within the city, with residential towers, walkways, and cultural buildings all in béton brut. Goldfinger's Balfron and Trellick Towers use a distinctive service-tower-and-slab composition. Lasdun's Royal National Theatre stacks horizontal concrete strata like geological layers. Look for the texture of timber formwork imprinted in the concrete.

Modernist

Clean lines, open plans, and an emphasis on light. London's Modernist entries span from the 1930s (the Isokon Flats, with their streamlined balconies and access galleries) to the 1960s (the Royal College of Physicians, where Lasdun's cantilevered lecture theatre floats above the entrance). Look for expressed structure, horizontal window bands, and white or light-rendered surfaces.

International Style

A specific strand of early Modernism characterised by steel-frame construction, glass curtain walls, and an absence of ornament. The Penguin Pool at London Zoo (Lubetkin and Tecton) demonstrates the style at its most playful — interlocking concrete ramps as pure geometry. The Cohen House (Chermayeff and Mendelsohn) is more austere: white walls, horizontal windows, a flat roof — the European avant-garde transplanted to the English coast.

Adaptive Reuse

Buildings transformed from one purpose to another while preserving their industrial character. Tate Modern is the landmark example: Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's massive brick power station, with its single chimney stack, was gutted and reimagined by Herzog & de Meuron as a sequence of gallery spaces. Look for the contrast between the original industrial shell and the surgical contemporary insertions.