http://www.blitzandblight.com/ An illustrated guide to Britain's controversial landscape /favicon.ico /icons/atomicon.gif Stephan Takkides All text and images are by Stephan Takkides. (CC) Some rights reserved. 2008-05-20T12:00:00Z

With a generous helping of private investment, the government plans to remedy England’s housing shortage with a massive building programme in the south-east of the country. The Thames Gateway, as this vast new suburb will be known, will stretch over great swathes of former industrial land, across east London, Essex and Kent — thus not infringing on the precious green belt.

http://www.blitzandblight.com/england/london/barkingriverside/ 2007-02-12T12:00:00Z 2008-05-20T12:00:00Z

The Elephant and Castle probably didn’t take its name from the young Queen Eleanor — the Infanta de Castile, travelling through here on her way to marry Edward I — but, rather more boringly, from a local public house. The Elephant and Castle pub was itself likely to have been named after the symbol of the smithy, from which the building had been converted.

http://www.blitzandblight.com/england/london/elephantandcastle/ 2007-02-12T12:00:00Z 2008-05-20T12:00:00Z

Trafalgar Square’s north-western plinth was built in 1841 as part of Charles Barry’s grand layout for the square. The plinth was intended to hold a statue of William IV, but this was never made and it remains without a permanent occupant.

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Quite unlike the glamorous London airport in which Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were stranded in The VIPs, the real Heathrow has grown overcrowded and ungainly. Its four older terminals are each with their own incongruous extensions, all in varying stages of decay and disrepair. And, so far, its brand-new fifth terminal seems to have caused more problems than it has solved.

http://www.blitzandblight.com/england/london/heathrowairport/ 2007-02-12T12:00:00Z 2008-05-20T12:00:00Z

Behind Stratford’s soon-to-open international station, the Lower Lea Valley sprawls out: a vast, graffitied, post-industrial wilderness of marshes and football pitches, intersected by dirty canals, scattered with pylons and walled in by factories, warehouses and piles of rubbish.

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Not quite as imposing as its Guys hospital neighbour, Southwark Towers stood, nonetheless, conspicuously over London Bridge station. Built in 1976, the structure’s 25 storeys provided offices for the international accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers.

http://www.blitzandblight.com/england/london/southwarktowers/ 2007-02-12T12:00:00Z 2008-05-20T12:00:00Z

In the mid-19th century, the extension of South-Western Railway, from Nine Elms to Waterloo Bridge, put a two-mile viaduct across Vauxhall’s once respectable pleasure gardens, providing them with a station for the last few years they were open. The name Vauxhall is reputedly the source of the Russian word for railway station, vokzal, because of the area’s association with its rail stop.

http://www.blitzandblight.com/england/london/stgeorgewharf/ 2007-02-12T12:00:00Z 2008-05-20T12:00:00Z

“The job of street furniture is to articulate the space between buildings: all it usually does today is to browbeat everything else in the view.” So wrote Ian Nairn, observing England’s streets more than 50 years ago. It seems little has changed. Red postboxes and public phones may be the epitome of picture-postcard Englishness, but the country’s streetscapes continue to come under criticism for their excessive signs, obstructive rails, inappropriate lighting and complicated road markings.

http://www.blitzandblight.com/england/london/streetfurniture/ 2007-02-12T12:00:00Z 2008-05-20T12:00:00Z

London’s staid, Edwardian baroque County Hall was rocketed into the 1970s with a six-storey concrete and glass annexe by the GLC’s architect John Bancroft.

http://www.blitzandblight.com/england/london/1westminsterbridge/ 2007-02-12T12:00:00Z 2008-05-20T12:00:00Z