London's Top Model Gets Bigger, Has More to Say


At the start of April, London's top model vanished without trace. Yet since the twenty-second of the month, at the same Bloomsbury haunt, the model has been back. Still... something has changed. The model is somehow bigger, and has a lot more on show.


Blueprint

Words by Herbert Wright

The model in question is a 1:2000 scale representation of London, and it replaces a previous model as the permanent exhibition highlight at the New London Architecture (NLA)'s galleries on Store Street. The new model, developed by Pipers and based on data in three dimensions supplied by the Ordnance Survey (OS), is not just a major update on the old, but upgrades what's on show in two significant ways.

close-up

The Shard and the Walkie Talkie squeeze pretty close to the red line of a strategic veiwing corridor. Photo: Paul Raftery

First, the area covered has expanded. The new NLA model represents 85 square kilometres and follows the Thames over 34km. The reach east of both old and new models was to Stratford and Becton, but the old one went only as far as Paddington and Knightsbridge in the west. The new model now extends as far Stockley Park, beyond Chiswick. That's because just as development in Docklands made London lurch east in the 90s, development action is now beginning to swing west, to places like Battersea and Old Oak Common.

City

Go West! Old Oak Common railway lands (brown area on left edge of photo) will see big new development. Photo: Herbert Wright

Second, the model has gone multimedia, all via touchscreens. Strategic viewing corridors that protect views of St Paul's can be overlaid, making clear why skyscrapers are where they are and where they will not emerge. There are short film presentations, for example on Tall Buildings, that can be activated to play on overhead monitors, but synchronise with light projections onto the model. Tube/railway lines can be shown too, including Crossrails 1 and 2. There's even an option to choose a particular property developer and see their particular developments spotlit.

side view

Attack of the 175cm Woman. She's taken control of the city with a touchscreen. Photo: Paul Raftery

The model now has about 170,000 buildings, but admittedly, a few new ones are missing. Theoretically, any major building with outline planning permission, as well as those under construction or less than two years old, can be represented by a white model (to distinguish it from older buildings in grey). But some are still to come, from the Imperial West tower in the west to a host of resi-towers on the Greenwich Peninsula in the east. The NLA actually leaves it down to developers to supply their new buildings. All are being chased up, and they should appear eventually, even if in grey. Not all white ones get built- the old model had The Pinnacle in the City, for example.

More and more cities put themselves on public show in miniature to highlight new developments, and London's not the only city to have expanded its model. As reported in Blueprint 339, Moscow is expanding its 1:400 scale showpiece by thirteen times, to reach out into the city's new south-western territories. Moscow will compete with New York's Panorama, a 1:1200 scale model in the Queens Museum, and the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center model, to claim the world's largest scale city model title.

London can't compete with that, but it's the only model that has gone truly multimedia.

 

(Main image: Paul Raftery)








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