When the jokes and buffoonery are dead and forgotten, the towers will remain. The true nature of Boris Johnson's London is taking shape in the form of some 30 bleak glass megaliths dotted at random across the capital. He did not intend them and appears not to have planned them. Like Ken Livingstone, Johnson came to power pledged to end the "pepper-potting" of London. As with Livingstone, power seized him in the grip of an edifice complex.
I cannot find a Londoner who realises what is about to happen on the south bank of the Thames opposite Westminster. Johnson and the planning minister, Nick Boles, have allowed a Qatari consortium to build a visual wall of towers on a truly Stalinist scale behind the Royal Festival Hall next to Waterloo. It is as if Paris had relocated La Défense to the Ile de la Cité. I am told these properties will mostly lie empty – useful collateral for the world's migratory money, ever in search of a safe haven.
The Shell Centre will be demolished, except for its central 26-storey slab. Four new towers, one even taller than the present one, will cling round it. Behind this cluster will rise a 29-storey stack of glass boxes on the site of Elizabeth House, rumoured to be the largest occupied structure in Europe. This will be dwarfed by a tower of luxury flats 100 yards downstream, its 43 storeys just seven fewer than Canary Wharf.
This massive scheme will comprise the greatest intrusion imaginable on the London skyline. Sited at the tip of the peninsular loop in the Thames meander, it will block sightlines from Westminster to the City of London and be far more dominant over the horizon than the Shard at Bermondsey, or "new Chinatown" soon to emerge upstream opposite Chelsea at Battersea. The latter will include a 60-storey Nine Elms tower, 10 more than Canary Wharf, to join the 50-storey ones arising at Vauxhall.
Talking towers with London architects is like talking disarmament with the National Rifle Association. A skyscraper seems every builder's dream. At a Royal Institute of British Architects seminar on the subject last April, I faced an audience almost entirely of architects who treated any criticism of tall buildings as nothing to do with aesthetics or urban culture but to do with denying them money. They played the man, not the ball, accusing critics of being elitist, reactionary, heritage-obsessed and enemies of architecture.
Of course cities must change with the times, and buildings with them. Like most people, I appreciate some modern buildings and not others, just as I want to protect some buildings and not others. I like Broadgate, the Gherkin and the new King's Cross. I admire Zaha Hadid's Olympic pool and Lord Foster's Millennium Bridge – not to mention Thomas Heatherwick's proposed garden bridge. I would not have saved Bankside power station or listed Goldfinger's bleak Elephant and Castle blocks, as the government did this week.
Tall buildings well sited can be exhilarating. I was thrilled by Dubai's Burj Khalifa – located as it is in the desert – and the City of London tower cluster seen from the Monument; Canary Wharf is exciting from Greenwich Park, less so from Poplar. But siting is all. Most London towers are plonked down wherever the money talked.
The charm of London still depends on relatively low-rise streets and open spaces. This is not an "accident of history", to be overridden by property speculation at will. It is part of the character of the metropolis. London's neighbourhoods can be revitalised, as are other European cities, to higher densities without the visual bruising of point blocks. It just needs planning.
London is alone among Europe's great cities in its drooling slavery to "anything goes" on its skyline, in its refusal to stand up to big money or choose a handsome development from a rubbish one. Its planners can regulate minute details of front doors or wall colours with, we assume, some urban aesthetic in mind. They regulate the foreground but let the background go to hell.
I can find no public document indicating where towers should be thought appropriate or inappropriate in London. There is no strategy for their location or exclusion, only a dwindling protection for "views" of St Paul's. Artist's impressions never indicate surrounding towers. Each planning permission is considered in isolation, frequently on appeal to heavily lobbied politicians.
Both the Conservatives in opposition and Johnson when running for office publicly pledged to bring such development under control. In 2007 David Cameron's "quality of life" group condemned Livingstone's "vulgarity of bigness", complaining that the ugly location of his towers was damaging London's appearance, its history and its tourist economy. It compared them with the grandiosity of Stalin and Mussolini. The politicians all changed the minds at the first pop of a lobbyist's champagne.
Towers imply civic leadership weak in the face of commercial pressure. They are not "vital" to the urban economy, least of all in a low-density city such as London. The last rash of speculative towers such as Centre Point in the 1970s mostly lay empty until rented for government offices. Today's are not built for people to use but as sleeping bank accounts for funk money. The Shard may well stay largely empty, like One Hyde Park and the palaces of Palm Island, Dubai. The rich may own them, but not inhabit them.
The truth is, as Leona Helmsley said of taxes, that London planning is "for the little people". The Qatari and Chinese edifices about to rise along the banks of the Thames are pastiches of the Gulf economy. They will cause widespread outrage. People will ask who on earth let them through. Remember the name: Boris Johnson.
