London Contemporary Architecture Mapped by Olly Wainwright

Explore highlights of contemporary architecture built across London from 2000 to 2025 with our new London Contemporary Architecture Map by Olly Wainwright. The map features 50 projects, from museums and major redevelopments to social housing and urban gardens, alongside an introduction, building details and original photography.

Below is Wainwright's introduction to the map along with a selection of his photographs. The map is available here.

High on Millennium fever, the 21st century architecture of London began with a big cultural bang, seeing major public projects like Norman Foster’s Great Court at the British Museum, Herzog & de Meuron’s Laban Dance Centre and Alsop & Störmer’s Peckham Library burst on to the scene. The confidence was mirrored on the skyline, with the jaunty arrival of the Gherkin – a startling form that unleashed a menagerie of ever stranger towers, each with their own nickname. Cementing London’s place as a centre of global finance and insurance, international starchitects raced to add their signature to the skyline: Richard Rogers’s Cheesegrater, Rafael Viñoly’s Walkie Talkie and Renzo Piano’s Shard joined the party, along with OMA’s more demure headquarters for the Rothschild Bank (pointedly leaning over the Bank of England, which it once bailed out).

(Left to right: The Gherkin; Saw Swee Hock Student Centre; and the Velodrome)

As the years progressed, the penchant for sculpted glass facades and colourful cladding shifted to a more restrained appetite for bricks, a material that came to define the architecture of the 2010s. Stacked, twisted, folded, and hung, bricks were used to dress everything from blocks of housing (in a style that became known as the New London Vernacular), to temples of higher education and palaces of culture. Take a look at the LSE’s twisting student centre by O’Donnell & Tuomey, Herzog & de Meuron’s truncated ziggurat looming behind Tate Modern, or their studio factory for the Royal College of Art in Battersea. Meanwhile, Peter Barber led the vanguard of characterful, socially-minded brick housing, sprinkling the city with his quirky terraces and back-to-backs, dotted with arches, as local councils finally returned to building homes again.

 The 2012 Olympics brought inevitable gentrification, but it also bestowed the East End with an impressive new park and assorted venues, of which Hopkins Architects’ Velodrome was a model of lean, pared-back design. Zaha Hadid’s Aquatics Centre is a thrill to swim in, if you can forget about its carbon footprint. The “legacy” of the sporting jamboree continues to evolve with mixed results, the most interesting contribution being O’Donnell & Tuomey’s V&A East, poised like a concrete crab on tiptoes, ready to scuttle away from the surrounding carnage.

(Left to right: 15 Clerkenwell Close; McGrath Road; Neuron Pod))

Elsewhere, younger architects focused their attention on more agile, temporary projects that did a lot with little, and often had unexpected afterlives. Practice Architecture transformed a multi-storey carpark in Peckham with an inventive rooftop cafe and sculpture garden. Feilden Fowles built their own studio in Waterloo, alongside an urban farmyard and community barn. Muf and J&L Gibbons transformed a strip of leftover land in Dalston into the Eastern Curve Garden, an oasis amid the bustle. 

As the impact of construction on the climate became increasingly apparent, architects focused their efforts on adaptive reuse, making the most of what was already there. Haworth Tompkins’s Young Vic theatre and Battersea Arts Centre were sophisticated models of the genre, while Assemble transformed a Victorian bathhouse into a beguiling gallery for Goldsmiths. As we reach a consensus that the most sustainable building is the one that already exists, the coming decades will see more of these surgical interventions and imaginative revivals, injecting the city’s timeworn fabric with dynamic new life.

Our London Contemporary Architecture Map is now available in stores and from our online shop here. It is also available as part of our collection of London maps here.