From St Pauls to the Gherkin, London's skyline is full of history – and character. Will the new tower frenzy spoil all that? Oliver Wainwright lists his top 10 worst upstarts

Dubai on Thames? … the London skyline. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

London is growing up!" trumpets a sign in the window of the New London Architecture centre. Inside, there's a forest of sticks and stumps, blobs and lumps – just some of the novelty silhouettes due to appear on the city's skyline over the coming years. There are more than 230 such towers in the pipeline, a figure that shocked even the city's deputy mayor for business, who might be thought to know about such things.

Sprouting over every corner of the city, most are of an architectural quality that recalls the outskirts of Dubai or Shenzhen. The overall impression is of an unplanned free-for-all, a steroidal frenzy of building tall, with little attention to individual design quality, or the cumulative effect that these scattered hulks might have on the city.

The Planning Decisions Unit of the Greater London Authority, the body responsible for greenlighting these schemes, begs to differ. "It is simply not true to say these towers haven't been planned," says director Colin Wilson. "They have been very carefully planned. But we prefer to use a flexible framework, rather than a rigid masterplan. This liberty is what makes London successful."

The London Plan, the mayor's rulebook for development across the capital, supports tall buildings where they "create attractive landmarks enhancing London's character". It states that such developments "should be of the highest design quality … attractive to look at and, where appropriate, inspire, excite and delight".

So how are these rules shaping up in reality? Here, we give our verdict on 10 new towers, built and imminent, counting down to the very worst offender …

10. 1 Merchant Square

Location: Paddington Basin | Floors: 42 | Height: 140m | Architect: Robin Partington | Status: approved | Use: residential and hotel

Already home to a motley collection of brash waterside blocks, all competing for attention with their jazzy cladding, Paddington Basin will soon be joined by Westminster's first skyscraper, in the form of this shiny blue cucumber. Designed by Robin Partington, architect of the Carbuncle Cup-winning Strata and the giant ground-scraping slug of Park House on Oxford Street, its apartments will apparently represent the "height of luxury living". Clad in a "midnight-blue ceramic rainscreen", this plump cousin of the Gherkin (in which Partington also had a hand) appears to be bursting out of its corset of "white porcelain ribs", which overshoot the penthouse skybar to form a tacky tiara on the skyline.

The GLA planners said: "An attractive form and a high-quality finish, and the impact of the building would be positive."

9. Canaletto

Location: City Road | Floors: 31 | Height: 100m | Architect: UN Studio | Status: on site | Use: Residential.

"Designed by genius", proclaim the billboards on City Road. "An architectural masterwork." Behind these slogans rises a concrete lift shaft that will soon service some of the most expensive penthouses in London. This is Canaletto, a tower designed by Professor Ben van Berkel of Dutch practice UN Studio, and one of the most hyped apartment buildings of recent times. With fat silvery frames wrapping around groups of floors in a vain attempt to break up the sheer bulk, it looks like a stack of hard drives or the back of a computer server – an accidental nod to the nearby Silicon Roundabout. The first of an unintended cluster, it has opened the doors for a thicket of forthcoming towers by Foster and Make, rising to more than half its height again.

The GLA planners said: "The materials used provide a homely feel to the building, reflecting its residential use as well as responding positively to the surrounding conservation areas."...Continue Reading

> via The Guardian