Somehow, these things always seem more desirable elsewhere. We Brits aren’t good at towers. When we do them, we do them half-heartedly. We tend to slice their tops off, as if a few floors less would make any positive difference. Piano’s original design for London Bridge Tower was nearly 300 feet taller, and looked better-proportioned. Like Cesar Pelli’s similarly truncated but otherwise very different Canary Wharf tower, it now looks stumpier than it ought. Perhaps as a result of this, it is not getting rave reviews, and has been summoned for inspection by the Environment Secretary, Stephen Byers. Architect and design pundit Piers Gough, no doubt noticing the big lump of new building sticking out from the foot of the tower, describes it with barbed wit as “A Dyson vacuum-cleaner, sucking up all the office space in London.”

Gough, though he also builds in Scotland, Ireland and the Netherlands, is a very London architect. The buildings emanating from him and his design partner Rex Wilkinson are knowingly eccentric, generally low-rise, though they range from a tiny Notting Hill public lavatory-cum-flower-shop to the mighty Cascades apartment tower, close to Canary Wharf on the Isle of Dogs. Although Gough modestly describes himself as a post-modernist who fell from favour in the 1990s (“We were out with the out crowd”) the truth is that he is permanently hip and, these days, very busy. He has just finished a typically in-your-face colourful and angular office building near Tate Modern on Bankside - in fact a reworking of a pair of respectively Victorian and 1960s buildings -has a number of distinctly startling new housing blocks planned around the new Arsenal stadium in North London, and has won the commission to redesign the Regency Galleries in the National Portrait Gallery. Being both an English Heritage commissioner and a member of the design review panel of CABE, the government’s architectural standards watchdog, means that he is closer than most to London’s decision-making apparatus on buildings.