Skyscrapers are fine but only in the right place

With an ominous creak, the coffin lid opens. The Prince, long of ear more than fang but nonetheless once feared, stirs. Those old enough to remember the havoc he once wrought, tremble.

Prince Charles is back, with his denunciations of carbuncles and modern architecture transformed into a new tirade against a "pockmarked skyline". Long schooled by nervous advisors to keep quiet, he has torn off his shroud and let rip. "A positive rash" of carbuncles, he says, "will disfigure precious views and disinherit future generations of Londoners".

The man who has unscrewed the coffin lid is none other than Ken Livingstone. For the Mayor's gung-ho approach to the city's skyline has given the Prince the perfect excuse to rise again. Back in the Eighties he derived his power not only from the thengreater deference to royalty but from the fact that he struck a chord with the public. Much modern architecture had indeed been terrible. The way the skyline of London is now being reshaped is indeed shocking.

It is not that Prince Charles is right when he asserts that towers should be confined to Canary Wharf. To spare his blushes I will pass over the fact that he once moaned about the Wharf for spoiling views from Greenwich, but it is absurd to exclude tall buildings from the already tower-strewn City of London, or assert that some arbitrary height limit should be imposed, based on the height that towers happened to reach in the Seventies. Or that London, a city whose strength has always been in change, should freeze. The problem is that the planning of London's airspace, one of the great sights of the world, is haphazard, incoherent and cack-handed.

It works something like this. The Mayor indicates that he wants towers, and especially in certain areas. In a small proportion of London they are forbidden, to protect views of St Paul's and the Palace of Westminster, but everywhere else there are no fixed rules at all. The Mayor's mantra is that towers should be "in the right place" and with "a world-class design", phrases sufficiently vague to mean anything.

Developers, emboldened by the Mayor, put forward towers wherever they think they might get them through. A "world class architect" will be chosen. Sometimes they take their proposals to him, when he will reliably tell them that they are not high enough, and ask for more affordable housing in the package.

The plans are submitted for planning approval with the local borough council. Planning officers will then stick their oar in, sometimes fiddling with the designs to suit their personal architectural predilections and theories.

Various paid experts and official taste committees pronounce as to whether the towers are "world-class architecture" in the "right place". Such committees usually include some architects who themselves have tower proposals on the go, and who may appear before the same committee the next or previous month. In the majority of cases, the tower proposals are magically found to be truly well designed and well located.

Sometimes the borough approves an application. Sometimes the scheme goes to a public inquiry, a long and expensive process in which the paid experts earn handsome fees to declare the architecture world-class, and the taste committees repeat their belief that the architecture is world-class, which leaves the inquiry inspector with little choice but to agree that it is indeed quite good. Even if he or she finds otherwise, the decision can be overturned by the relevant Secretary of State, who has ultimate authority, as happened when John Prescott waved through the infamous Vauxhall Tower.

It is a process based on a large number of opinions, and few guiding principles, which is distinctly weak in the face of power of the profit motive. It also lacks any overall vision as to what the collective effect of all these decisions might be. The result is the Hieronymus Bosch skyline of weird and warped forms that the City will become, if all proposed towers are built.

It is almost irrelevant how good or otherwise individual architects are, as the towers are not shaped by their aesthetic judgment so much as by the blunt economics of forcing as much lettable floor area as possible into the available space, and the expediencies of forcing large buildings through whatever gaps the planning system allows. If a building is an oversized lump, the finest architect in the world can't disguise the fact. And if one or two of the towers manage to be individually well designed, this, too, counts for little, when each tower is in cacophonous conflict with the next.

The potential city skyline, on which all these fine architects and experts and committees and planners have deliberated, is quite simply a witless, ugly disgrace. It shows no sign of intelligence, no positive idea of what London could be. No attempt is made to make one tower relate to another.

Yet if the millions spent on inquiries and lawyers and opinionating had been spent on establishing some basic principles, London could have a new, modern skyline to be proud of. Manhattan, and even Hong Kong, have a less anarchic system than London, and are the better for it.

It is, however, exactly as the Mayor wants it - he has made it clear that his main interest is in getting as many towers built as possible, and in the harvest of subsidised affordable housing he hopes to get from them. (And never mind that towers are risky ventures and that some of them will never get built, leaving profitless, empty sites). As he now has enhanced powers to get his way, including the right to approve schemes that the boroughs have previously turned down, we will see more Ken-inspired pinnacles piercing the air.

The problem for the rest of us is not only that we will get a mess but also that modern architecture as a whole will get a bad name. There will be pressure to return to cautious, negative, backwardlooking buildings, justified on the grounds that architects can't be trusted to do anything else. This, with the wearying predictability of Groundhog Day, is exactly where we were a quarter-century ago, when the Prince first pronounced on architecture. This will not be in anyone's interests, least of all developers' and architects'.