In contemporary Paris many of President Mitterrand’s much-vaunted grands projets reek of bombastic pomposity

In contemporary Paris, many of President Mitterrand’s much-vaunted grands projets reek of bombastic pomposity.In the world-city rat race, Landry and Bianchini call for “a strategy which provides impetus and encouragement”. But they wisely add that any strategy must “leave the city space to develop naturally as well”. The City of London tucked its historic Guildhall into a modest urban corner. The British Museum is, and always has been, a world-class treasure house in an unspectacular side-street We should keep faith with this spirit. At times, John Major and Jacques Chirac seem to be trying to create a new Entente Cordiale. The last one gave London some of its heaviest monuments – Admiralty Arch, the facade of Buckingham Palace, the old County Hall, all designed to keep up with the Parisians.London’s truest urban spirit has always been more discreet; you could say messier The grand is scattered among the domestic.

Albert Dock has come up in the world, but Liverpool continues to sink.There is a delicate line to tread. Competition with Paris, with its historic commitment to state intervention, has been a persistent theme in London’s history, but it is important not to be obsessed by the rivalry. It is less certain what it will do for the “regeneration” of Southwark as a whole. In Liverpool, Albert Dock – home of the northern branch of the Tate Gallery – is also said to be a great success.

It should be, after the heap of Merseyside Development Corporation cash shovelled into it. But incoming visitors drive round to the Albert Dock shops, cafes and art gallery while avoiding the old city centre like the plague. (Wanamaker won permission on appeal.) Now Southwark has been Blairised. Under a leader, Jeremy Fraser, the council sweated blood to persuade Serota to choose Bankside for the new gallery.The Southwark riverside strip lies at the heart of his strategy for pulling the borough up by its shabby bootstraps. In a paradigm of the ACE economy, this strip runs from Terence Conran’s fun enclave just east of Tower Bridge (the Design Museum, the Butler’s Wharf restaurants); past the tourist lure of the bridge itself; onward to the riverside site proposed for a temporary opera house, to be got ready for when Covent Garden shuts down in order to spend its own slice of lottery money; then HMS Belfast and the Hay’s Wharf shopping galleria; and then beyond that to Bankside and the Globe before reaching the old South Bank of the Festival Hall and the National Theatre.Yet it is as well to be wary of the new urban boosterism All this is attractive in its own right. When Sam Wanamaker sought planning permission for the new Globe, the council refused him on the grounds that this was the only suitable site to store the municipal dustcarts.