Norman foster

What does £450 million get you these days? With that cash, you could buy a Premier League football club. Or fund 10,000 nurses for a year. If you’re feeling civic-minded, why not give everyone in the UK a fiver and have a chunk of change left over? In the case of the Parliamentary Restoration and Renewal (R&R) programme – the plans to rebuild and repair the Palace of Westminster – the best part of £500 million has been spent on, well, it’s quite hard to tell. MPs and peers have batted ideas back and forth about how to fix their grade I-listed, Unesco World Heritage workplace for more than two

London’s City Hall stands empty. The bulbous, Foster + Partners-designed ‘glass testicle’ — in Ken Livingstone’s words — occupies one of the best sites in the capital: Thames-side, squaring off to the Tower of London, and overlooking Tower Bridge. But in December, its occupiers — the Mayor, the London Assembly and the Greater London Authority — deserted their glitzy £43 million headquarters for a cheaper building more than five miles east at the Royal Docks in Newham. It took them less than 20 years to outgrow their purpose-built home. According to the architectural commentator John Grindrod, City Hall is a giant glass-and-steel metaphor. ‘The building represents the role of the