East End Preservation Society Lecture: C R Ashbee Memorial Lecture 2016

Rowan Moore explores The Future of London in the Second C R Ashbee Memorial Lecture. Drawing on his recent book Slow Burn City: London in the Twenty-First Century, Moore looks at the physical fabric of contemporary London as a site of social and cultural struggles, connecting the political and architectural decisions of London’s enfeebled and reactive government with the built environment that affects its inhabitants’ everyday lives.

London has always been a city of trade, exploitation and opportunity. But London has an equal history of public interventions, like the Clean Air Act, the creation of the green belt and council housing, and the innovation of infrastructure projects like the sewers and embankments that removed the threat of water-born cholera. The responses to the challenge of a transforming London were creative and unprecedented – huge in scale and often controversial.

So while London must change, Moore explains why it should do so with a ‘slow burn’, through the interplay of private investment, public good and legislative action.

Rowan Moore is architecture critic for the Observer and previously for the Evening Standard. He is a trained architect, and between 2002 and 2008 was Director of the Architecture Foundation.
The East End Preservation Society is proud to present Rowan Moore delivering the Second C R Ashbee Memorial Lecture. This annual lecture honours C R Ashbee (1863–1942), designer, architect, social activist and a passionate and influential pioneer in the movement to preserve London’s historic buildings.