London: Open City
Somerset House, London

London has the worst public space of any European city. Discuss. London is the city not of the passeggiata or fiestas, of piazzas or boulevards, but of gated gardens, pubs spilling their pissed and puking progeny on to narrow pavements; the city where local authorities treat teenagers like bothersome flies, to be deterred from hanging around by introducing high-pitched whining loudspeakers that only the young can hear. It is a city of privatised public space in which you can be (and I often am) moved on for trying to take a photo of a building, a city of clunky bollards, piles of bin bags, crushed crush barriers, enigmatic steel boxes that are surely too large to hold simple circuits for traffic lights or telephones, mass-produced mini-brick paving laid like a shroud over pavements in front of dying shops or monotonous chains... London’s public space is, er, different.

At least, that’s how it can seem. In fact, London is a dense network of spaces that have proved adaptable to change and more or less successful. Its best places are, paradoxically, its worst public spaces; the tight grid of Soho, the workshop and warehouse canyons of Shoreditch and Hoxton, the leafy streets of Kensington, the alleys of Shepherds Market. The city’s big public spaces – Trafalgar Square, Parliament Square, Covent Garden – are left to the tourists. This is not a city of grand gestures.