3. WALKING
BETWEEN PETTICOAT LANE MARKET AND LEADENHALL MARKET
— You can’t miss the "Erotic Gherkin" —
After rummaging through the market stalls at Petticoat Lane, it’s off to a very different London market, Leadenhall, this one very much the beating heart of The City any weekday lunchtime.
From Wentworth Street leave Petticoat Lane market by crossing Middlesex Street, turning right onto Middlesex, and then left onto Harrow Place. Turn right and then immediately left onto Cutler Street, emerging at the main street called Houndsditch, in medieval times an open sewer just outside the London wall. Its name, it is suggested, has to do with the large number of dead dogs that floated among the exposed filth. No wonder that plague and other diseases took heavy tolls on this part of London until the Great Fire forced the rebuilding of the City.
REVOLUTIONARY ARCHITECTURE IN THE CITY:
TOWER BRIDGE, TOWER 42, & THE "GHERKIN"
Cross Houndsditch and jog right-then-left onto St. Mary Axe. This street leads SSW between two of London’s highest landmark skyscrapers: Tower 42 (the former NatWest Building) on the parallel Bishopsgate a block west of St. Mary Axe, and the remarkable Swiss Re Tower at 30 St. Mary Axe. Tower 42 was London’s first great modern skyscraper, a tour de force of the 1980’s that helped reestablish the City as the world’s most important banking center. Cries of sacrilege were heard from all quarters—including Buckingham Palace—when Tower 42 altered London’s skyline. What would be a fairly pedestrian office building in Manhattan caused a revolution in London.
The architectural revolution started in the 1980’s remains propelled by controversy to this day, with no new building causing more mouths to drop that 2004’s Swiss Re Tower, often called "The Gherkin" (and "The Erotic Gherkin" and "The Towering Innuendo") by Londoners. While the football-shaped Swiss Re Tower is not the tallest building in London—they’re found in the East End Docklands at Canary Wharf—it is currently the most revolutionary. That won’t last long, however, as more innovative (and taller) buildings have already been approved for construction nearby, including the taller-than-Tower 42 Heron Tower (to be built on Bishopsgate), the taller-yet Leadenhall Building (as yet proposed), and—most remarkable—the London Bridge Tower. This latter—already approved—is known as "The Shard of Glass" and will rise 1,000 feet above the Thames at the City’s southern border.
In stark contract to The Gherkin, and virtually across St. Mary Axe from it, is the Tudor church St. Andrew Undershaft. The old church houses a memorial to John Stow, author of the seminal 1598 "A Survey of London", a comprehensive late-Tudor catalog of the buildings of The City and Westminster in a sunshine presentation worthy of a modern chamber of commerce. The unusual name of the church comes from the fact that a popular maypole once stood nearby. Now, 400+ years later, a fantastically larger maypole stands just across the street.
In short order St. Mary Axe street ends at Leadenhall Street. Across Leadenhall Street the continuation of St. Mary Axe is Lime Street, which forms the eastern limit of Leadenhall Market.