London Festival of Architecture Sky Ride Podcasts

Fergus Connolly is a specialist in historic architecture and conservation at Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios. This ride visits several churches built in the wake of the Great Fire of London, in particular those of Christopher Wren and Nicholas Hawksmoor. The ride considers the context of these architectural gems in terms of religion, arts, and the city, and seeks to illustrate their continual relevance and value.

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Led by landscape and planting designer Sarah Price of Sarah Price Landscapes, celebrates how gardens and parks have kept biodiversity alive in cities, providing rich experiences for wildlife and people. Not only can naturalistic city planting be environmentally sound but, if thoughtfully designed, it can be dramatically beautiful. The ride looks at the smallest gardens, roadside verges to the largest parks. The ride begins at the View Tube overlooking the 2012 Olympic Park development and continues through Mile End Park, through Wapping, over Tower Bridge and along the South Bank, crossing Waterloo Bridge and finishing at the Phoenix Gardens in the West End.

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Ideas about city housing schemes have changed almost beyond recognition over the last 100 years. This tour of some of London’s iconic housing estates shows how they have been remodelled and updated for a new century and a new way of living. The ride is led by designer Wayne Hemingway but a cast of architects are on hand to share their expertise on the particular developments they have worked on. They are David Levitt, Caroline Duff, Sheelagh McManus and Keyvan Lankarani.

The ride begins at the Brunswick Centre in Bloomsbury. the next two stops were at two Peabody Trust buildings, the first in Farringdon, built in the middle of the nineteenth century, the second in Kings Cross, built nearly a hundred years later and recently refurbished. From here it is an uphill ride to Hampstead and a visit to the famous Isokon building that was built in the 1930s as a modernist experiment in communal living. The final stop in this ride is the Alexandra Road Estate, sometimes known as Rowley Way, in Kilburn. It was built in the 1970s according to a design by Neave Brown.

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Led by Stephen Bayley, design guru and architecture and design correspondent of The Observer newspaper. He is a former Chief Executive of the Design Museum and in 1989 was awarded France’s top cultural accolade, and made a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Starting with the first ever building-as-an-advertisement – the Michelin Building, then onto Westminster Abbey to see the influence of Reims, Amiens and Chartres. Next stop, the Wallace Collection to view the unsurpassed collection of French furniture and art, and then straight onto Picadilly to see Erno Goldfinger’s homage to Le Corbusier. Jean Cocteau’s murals in the Notre Dame de France at Leicester Place provide a welcome pause and then straight on to the last Huguenot church in London – French Church, Soho Square. Final destination, One New Change in Cheapside by the current french starchitect Jean Nouvel.

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Roger Madelin is joint chief executive of Argent property developers. This ride sets out to see some new public spaces being formed on the railway lands at King’s Cross. From there it heads into Islington to look at small and large parks, gardens and play spaces in wealthy and not so wealthy areas. The tour then goes into the City, through Broadgate, Finsbury Square and Devonshire Square, past Aldgate East and over the river to Potters Fields.

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