Tonight:
4°c
Images like this seem to be from a bygone era, if a recent one. They speak of a limitless confidence in the ability of developers to knock down drab grey blocks and rustle up shiny new ones. They also speak of a time before Prince Charles re-emerged as an architectural taste-maker.
But it seems there's hopefulness in hotels these days, and more so than in other areas of property. The 2012 boost will be brief, but a cheap pound, if it stays so over the years, will bring more tourists here.
Will Alsop's shiny bug of a building should improve one of the grimmer stretches of the river. This ought to be a fantastic place already, next to a majestic waterway and close to St Paul's Cathedral, but it is dominated by cars and gloomy architecture. The Alsop scheme could create a decent pedestrian space at ground level, and presents what is in effect a big glass-fronted balcony to the water.
Its location next to retained Sixties blocks is instructive: the latter are the kind of modern buildings nobody likes, whereas the Alsop project is the kind of modern architecture some people do.
Charles will not be one of them but even he might be able to see that the proposed hotel celebrates the fact that it is on the river. It also, as planning rules say it must, stays out of views of St Paul's.
Alsop, who is one of the more vociferous champions of contemporary architecture in the face of royal attacks, has proposed new buildings for this site before but without success. It's just possible that the miraculous buoyancy of the hotel business means that this one actually happens.
