From Blackfriars Bridge

My cycling commute homeward takes me north over Blackfriars Bridge, close to Tate Modern. Looking east, Blackfriars railway station has recently been extended to stretch from bank to bank; its solar roof provides half of the station's energy. What I have always enjoyed about this view, from the safely of the cycle lane or during windswept interludes halfway across, is the way just a handful of London's most recognisable buildings poke up from behind the station. From the left come the Barbican towers, St Paul's Cathedral, Tower 42 (the old NatWest tower), the Cheesegrater with the Gherkin almost hidden behind…

…then the curvy lines of the new Walkie Talkie, before a gap for the river Thames beneath us (and the spine of the book), and then the pointy Shard, the brick tower of Tate Modern and finally its ziggurat-esque extension, due to open next year.

Look west, and this bridge is one of the best places to view sunsets in London (weather permitting, terms and conditions apply) – but somehow I like these views to the east just as much.

The Walkie-Talkie: new on London's skyline

London's drive for a distinctive skyline continues unabated. Following on from the Shard and the Gherkin, taking shape now are the Walkie-Talkie and the Cheesegrater. (The half-finished Helter Skelter is currently on hold, and the Scalpel is in the pipeline, as it were.)
The eyecatching feature of the Walkie-Talkie, at 20 Fenchurch Street, is that it curves outwards towards its top, so the highest floors are larger than those lower down, giving it the appearance of a giant telephone receiver popping up through the city's buildings. Designed by Rafael Viñoly, it is due to open in April 2014, and while most of us usually have to make do with the external appearances of towers in the financial district, this time there will be a "skygarden" open to the public. The plan is that it will be free, but require advanced booking. We'll see how that goes. Would it have received approval without the garden?
Finding it to draw presented the usual problem with tall buildings in a city: the closer you get, the harder it is to see. At Leadenhall Market, from where I drew this, the view opens up and the curve of the building's sides becomes apparent, as if any interest in accurate perspective has gone out of the window. Turning around, and the rising Cheesegrater was visible, looming over Leadenhall Market. (More here on this one soon.)
At 38 floors, the Walkie-Talkie is hardly the world's tallest (the Burj Khalifa has 164), or even London's (it barely makes it into its top 10), but it looks as if it will have an overpowering presence on the scrum of tall buildings north of London Bridge. The crowd is getting thicker. Old friends—and enemies—are getting lost in the midst of it.

London's Olympic Stadium

The Olympic stadium in Stratford is a few miles away from where we live in north London, close enough, like most of London probably, for us to see its lights beaming into the night air on the evening of the opening ceremony's rehearsal. Tonight is the real thing.

Are Londoners cynical and moaning about the Olympics? Many are, but many of these moaning cynics were among the millions that went to see the Olympic torch as it passed around the country. I know: I was among them...

The finished Shard: Europe's tallest (for now)

James Hobbs, The Shard from Southwark Street

Having posted drawings of London's newest tallest building as a promising stump in 2010 and as an unfinished, unfurling skyscraper in 2011, I thought I'd mark its recent opening with another of the finished thing.

The 310-metre building launched with a light display at the beginning of July 2012. We live a few miles to the north and went up on to the roof of the house to watch the lasers beaming around the city. Perhaps our expectations were, like the Shard, too high: it wasn't so exciting.

Is the building any better? The angles of its sides means it invariably reflects the colour of the sky, which I like, even though this particular summer that colour has, until now, been that of rainclouds.

The Shard is distinctive, certainly, but dwarfing and isolated. And how do the £50 million penthouses, luxury hotel and £24.95 adult ticket prices to the as-yet-unopened viewing tower relate to what's happening in the streets it has risen from? How many people from Southwark are working in its offices? I have the feeling it is probably better to be on the inside looking out, than on the outside looking in.

The Shard: London's newest tallest building

London, Britain even, has a new tallest building. The Shard is still on the way up - this is how it looked last week - but it has already gone higher than One Canada Square at Canary Wharf. This may sound ridiculously obvious, but it really is incredibly high: to stand beneath it and look towards its disappearing summit is to look into a place where nothing, apart from the occasional feral pigeon or police helicopter, has any right to be.

Its designer, Renzo Piano of Pompidou Centre fame, has said that its top "would come to almost nothing", by which he means, I think, a point, above which will be exactly nothing. After 72 storeys, including a viewing gallery and open-air observation deck, there will be another 15 "radiator floors".

It is difficult to pass judgment on a building that isn't even finished yet, but the Shard does look a little remote from the rest of London's high-rise architecture, and I get the feeling that its glassiness and straight lines will mean it ages quickly. As I draw it from London Bridge, people continually stop, stare and photograph it. And from an unrepresentative sample of a couple of conversations with them, praise was not immediately forthcoming.

The Shard, London Bridge

I was near London Bridge this week when I caught sight of a concrete stump emerging from between the railway station and Guy's Hospital, usefully labelled "Shard". Concrete stump it may be now, but when it is completed in 2012 (the year of the London Olympics) it will be the UK's tallest building, and one of the city's most recognisable landmarks. And there won't be any concrete on show when it is finished: its architect Renzo Piano has compared the 310-metre building to a shard of glass. Have a look at this.

Corridors of power

On my way yesterday to the Royal Academy to deliver the £25 entry fee for this year’s Summer Show in return for, well, nothing usually, I stop off by London’s City Hall next to Tower Bridge. The view of the city’s financial district from the new building, occupied by mayor Ken Livingstone until the elections in May, at least, is spectacular. An evolving clump of high-rise buildings gaze back from the north side of the river with only the dwarfed Tower of London and Tower Bridge in view to remind the tourists gathered here that the city has a history longer than the 40 years the architecture suggests.

Encouraged by Livingstone, more new huge towers are planned to be built in the city in the coming years, many of them changing this very view from City Hall. The Heron Tower, now being constructed at 110 Bishopsgate, will have 47 floors and 680,000 square feet of office space when it is completed in 2011. Broadgate Tower, straddling the railway lines at Liverpool Street and now almost complete, is 35 storeys high. The Walkie Talkie on Fenchurch Street, planned at 36 floors, is due to be ready in 2010, and so named because its top floors are larger than the lower ones. The Shard at London Bridge will be a whopping 72 floors, making it the tallest in the UK and Europe if it is finished on schedule in 2011. The 48-storey Cheese Grater, named because, well, work it out yourself, is another planned to be ready in 2011. And there are more.

But will they really be ready then, or will they really be built at all? As I drew the skyline from a cafe almost under Tower Bridge, the financial markets contained within the buildings before me were in a state of meltdown, with the FTSE 100 index down by 4% on just that day. Financial uncertainty is in the air. Turbulence in the markets has already delayed the construction of some of these buildings, so how do things look today? And even if they are built, who is going to be moving in to them? It was years before the 50-storey One Canada Square at Canary Wharf was fully occupied and profitable after it had been topped out in 1991.

A strong economy can only help artists hoping to sell their work, and having just had an art consultancy take me on that works primarily with clients in the corporate sector, the arrival of many acres of new wall space that will need filling just a few miles from our front door can be seen as a promising development. London has been transformed in recent years – a walk along the South Bank proves that – and its skyline looked set to change even more in the coming years. How does that vision look today?