Best of British (nobody likes PoMo)

The opening of the Shard: typically understated.

TimeOut (you know, that thing that no-one in London reads) is doing its annual Best Building / Worst Building popular-o-meter.

Rather than just letting us all name and shame / phrase and praise [best I could do] any old building, the TimeOut crew have preselected 20 iconic and 20 bad 'bits of architecture'.  This helps us all not have to think too hard.  Or notice that TimeOut is using 'iconic' as an synonym for 'good'.  Hmm.

Anyway, the 'iconic' list can be broken down into a few basic tropes:

- Old / old looking (the Globe, the Tower of London, St Pauls)
- Fairytale Victoriana (St Pancras, Natural History Museum, Royal Courts of Justice)
- Moderne / Art Deco (Hoover Building, Senate House, Battersea Power Station)
- Brutalism (South Bank Complex, Trellick Tower)
- Random novelty (Neasden Temple), and
- The oooh shiny-shinies (the Lloyds Building, the Gherkin, the Shard)

You mustn't think too hard here either, or you'll spot that the 'South Bank Complex' is a cluster of buildings ranging from the simple curve of the 1951 Royal Festival Hall to the oh-god-I'm-trapped-again shuttered concrete mazes of 60s and 70s fundom alongside it.

Familiarity inevitably helped the TimeOut lot select their best buildings. Goldfinger's Trellick Tower is nice enough and has been seen by loads of motorists stuck on the A40 (like the Hoover Building). But the lesser-known and earlier Balfron Tower, done by the same geezer somewhere over near Poplar, is a better bet if you like your Flapjack Brutalism.  Balfron is surrounded by a cluster of other Brutalist slabs and point-blocks, and has a simply terrifying concrete 'playground' at the bottom, which adds to the inhuman, other-worldly nature of the site.

Smile.  Or perhaps don't.

And Balfron thoroughly trumps Trellick in terms of views - the west-facing panorama from a top-floor flat in Balfron is astounding, taking in everything from Battersea Power Station to the City in one glance.

Oh hai all of london!!

A great addition to the shiny-shiny list would be the Canada Water library, which looks like an improbable golden Sandcrawler, leaning towards the Surrey Quays BHS across the lake.  But no-one knows it's there.

And Barratt's Aspiration Wharf 'stunning development'.

Suppose it's too early for any of the lovely Olympics stuff to be included.

The 'bad' list notably only contains things built after 1960 (because everything more than 50s years old is, of course, wonderful).  There's a more Brutalism (the Brunswick Centre, Centre Point, Robin Hood Gardens), and more brand-new stuff (the silly ArcelorMittal Orbit 'sculpture', the new Wembley Stadium, City Hall), and a bit of PoMo (the Millennium Dome, No 1 Poultry, and Farrel's actually rather good MI6 juggernaut).

The City's novelty-socks building.

Undermining any pretence that the whole exercise is anything other than a measure of current fashion and taste, the TimeOut worst list features a few buildings that are also on the best list (the Shard, the Barbican, the South Bank Complex).  

Shockingly, the conclusion might be that some people like some buildings, and others prefer different ones.  Oooh.  Fancy that.