In an early instance of what we can expect will become a real estate panic in the aftermath of Covid-19’s economic impact, Sadiq Khan recently announced that the London Assembly plan to abandon their current home on the south bank of the Thames, in sight of Tower Bridge, and move to an empty building in London’s Docklands. With a potential saving of £55 million over the next five years, it makes strict economic sense, but it highlights some interesting problems about the representational role that architecture plays in our political system.

The first thing to note is the fact that the London Assembly, inhabiting a purpose-built hall designed by Lord Foster’s practice, were renting in the first place. The owner of the building, Kuwaiti state-owned St Martin’s Property, use the GLA as a landmark tenant for their More London development, made up of sleek spec offices and chain lunch stores, which is a classic example of a POPS (Privately Owned Public Space), where public life is conducted at the owner’s discretion.

The building that they intend to relocate to is currently called The Crystal, described as an ‘urban sustainability centre’. Originally built as a joint venture between the London Development Agency and manufacturing giant Siemens in 2012, it was taken over fully by the GLA after Siemens moved out in 2019. It sits at the western end of the Royal Victoria Docks in Newham, East London, a shiny, affectedly wonky shed building whose USP is that it is crammed full of green technology, from ground-source heat pumps to solar panels and rainwater harvesting.

I have a personal connection to this building, as one of the first jobs in architecture I had after the post-2008 recession was working for a now-defunct architectural practice on its design competition. What was odd about this project was that there was no real brief — it seemed that, with the Olympics approaching, a deal had been made with Siemens that they would invest in the project, and would receive a flagship building they could use as an Olympic showcase for their future technologies. In the end, the building didn’t open until after the games concluded, and eventually Siemens walked away from it.

The Crystal was an early taste of the projects that became Boris Johnson’s specialty while he was mayor of London from 2008–’16 — a series of spectacularly useless objects whose main function would be visual branding and urban pizzazz, usually tied to a corporate client that Johnson had charmed, but more often than not resulting in a costly failure, paid for by public funds. The most famous of these was the controversial and eventually defeated Garden Bridge project, but even The Crystal, itself a failure on its stated intention, lies directly underneath the northern end of the Emirates Air Line, the notorious flop of a cable car that Johnson conceived for the games, which continually draws money from Transport For London’s public budget.

The logic behind this kind of project is regeneration. The Royal Docks is one of the last large areas of industrial London that has not been fully redeveloped, and around The Crystal there remain large warehouse sites, while a £3.5 billion redevelopment of the giant sixty-two acre Millennium Mills site is underway. Along the dock from The Crystal is the vast conference venue the Excel Centre — currently the Nightingale Hospital — behind that the ‘Asian Business Port’, another Johnson flop, while nearby are various speculative new build housing blocks. It barely resembles a coherent place, and is a poor advertisement for a historic city.

In almost all modern societies, the seat of government is a building that is accorded special symbolic importance. And as governance gradually separates from religious and royal authority, the architecture of secular power becomes especially important. In the UK this is demonstrated by the Houses of Parliament, whose location represents its central role in the state, and whose mid nineteenth-century neo-gothic architecture was chosen to represent the continuity and morality of British tradition.

More contemporary parliaments, such as Foster’s renovated Reichstag in Berlin, which London’s City Hall is a derivative of, use transparency as a motif, whereby the visibility of the political process is a metaphor for the involvement of the people in democracy itself. But what does it mean if a legislature moves into a half-baked corporate hand-me-down, surrounded by tacky flats and novelty infrastructure?

Across the river from the Houses of Parliament, London’s County Hall was the scene of the long battle fought by Ken Livingstone’s Greater London Council against the Thatcher government. Thatcher won, abolishing the GLC, and County Hall’s Edwardian pomp now houses amusement arcades and ‘Shrek’s Adventure’. If Khan’s London Assembly are forced out to the Docklands, it is grimly tantalising to imagine what future use for City Hall will be most symbolic of the current democratic morass.