Riba’s ‘Difficult Sites’ exhibition in London is worth 20 minutes of your time

At the weekend I went to see a new exhibition at the Royal Institute of British Architects (Riba) at their HQ near Great Portland Street called Difficult Sites: Architecture Against the Odds.

It isn’t a big show – you can easily get round it in 20-25 mins and read everything – but I really enjoyed it. It has some original scale models and photographs and diagrams of some of the trickiest architecture projects in the UK in recent years, many of which you will recognise as now being landmark developments.

The difficulties sometimes come from the environment itself (like building the Eden Project on a shifting quarry), size constraints (Alexandra Road Estate), trying to build on or around existing ruins of emotional significance (like the new Coventry cathedral design), or just when a site becomes a public controversy because of the unwelcome oar of Prince Charles or Margaret Thatcher (the National Gallery extension, the budget for the British library).

It is free to get in, and is on until spring 2025, so if you are around the area, I recommend you drop in …