Old London bore little resemblance to the bland London of the present. Old London was a vibrant, creative, moody city with endless visual delights. It was also dank and mildewed, prone to crime and fire. That's okay...it was still more interesting than any modern city.
With buildings so close together fire was an ever present danger. The solution of the time was periodic wide boulevards which would act as a kind of fire break. Maybe that was a mistake. Boulevards are frequently awkward and unaesthetic wind traps. You have to have some but too many can deface the city they're trying to protect.
Maybe the city would have done better to regulate the kind of oil lamps that were used. Maybe banning candles and certain types of stoves and heaters might have been more helpful. Or maybe do the boulevard thing, but provide frequent walking bridges or tunnels.
Old London made good use of wrought iron. Iron and bricks (above) make a nice match, especially when the bricks and woodwork were painted black.
Old London was also full of balconies. That needs to be explained since London is a North European city and most Northern cities didn't feel the need for them. Maybe the balconies were a symbol for rooms to rent.
I love balconies, especially wooden ones (above) with wooden floors. Oh, to go back in a time machine and be a kid running around the corridors!
Some of the mid-size streets (above) were incredibly beautiful. If London had retained more of the best ones it could have attracted the kind of tourist dollars that Paris gets now.
And while I'm on the subject of Paris...what if Paris had followed the lead of the English and replaced their old town with a modern monstrosity (above) like the kind that Tati parodied in
Playtime? Would anyone, even the Parisians, have had a desire to live there? Fortunately Paris kept the 19th Century part of the city and isolated the newer buildings in a modernist ghetto on the Right Bank.
You could wish they'd retained more of the Pre-Nineteenth Century architecture (above), but lets be grateful that they saved what they did.
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Thanks to Kellie Strom for the great link!
Here's an English residential street (above) done in the brutalist style. The houses are probably cozy enough inside but outside they present an intimidating row of clunky slabs which seem to menace passers-by. 
Here's another English street (above) built on an old continental model. The architecture may be foreign but it works and I can't for the life of me understand why the English are so reluctant to import good visual ideas from their neighbors.
Here's the brutalist style again (above), this time in America. This building is a terrain hog which probably throws all the smaller buildings around it out of scale. The building almost certainly is OK inside. Outside it's a big, sentimental, selfish Baby Huey of a slab, solicitous of its own workers and indifferent to everyone else.
I thought I'd end on a positive note. Here's a typical cluster of chain stores and gas stations that you find in American hollows where major routes intersect. I want to dislike it but I can't. It's a whore but it's an honest whore. It's happily commercial. Here the weary traveler can find coffee and a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich served by a cheerful local waitress. Here are liquor stores full of lottery tickets, tobacco, dirty magazines, candy, comics, beer and ice. Liquor stores are islands of sanity and if they ever disappear the world will be a sadder place.
