But what interests me most are coastal towns whose economies have been destroyed by seismic changes in holiday habits, infrastructure, industrial policies and fishing. As I completed my latest leg up to Middlesborough, I wondered what we might learn from these places, how they have transformed themselves – or not – in the light of the post-COVID changes happening to our cities across the land.
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As I arrived in Scarborough, I was struck by how the Grand Hotel dominated the steep escarpment that drops down to the beaches and amusement arcades that line the harbour. I had seen the hotel online when booking somewhere to stay. Rooms were £35 a night. That didn’t seem right.

It’s Grade II*. At the time of its opening in 1867, it was the largest hotel and brick structure in Europe. There were 365 bedrooms, one for each day of the year. The plan is in the shape of a 'V' in honour of Queen Victoria. Wealthy Victorian holidaymakers flocked to the place.

Now it houses Afghan refugees. The wealthy no longer go in great numbers. The less well-off have deserted it for the Costa Brava or Kavos.

For me, one of the more heartening features of the town was the Bike and Boot Hotel, part of a growing chain developed to appeal to a different type of holidaymaker, quite a few of whom would have arrived via the Cinder Track from Whitby. The track follows the route of the train line that served the coast up until the Beeching cuts of the 1960s. It’s a lovely bike ride, but a train service would be better for the economies of towns along the coast. Beeching has a lot to answer for, as I am sure Sunak will in 50 years' time when the lack of HS2 will have held back the businesses of the Northern Powerhouse.

Cycling through Hull, one felt that the Year of Culture in 2017 had had a tangible impact on the city – Humber Street in the Fruit Market Area was lively, with cafés spilling out onto the cobbled street. The old town looked spick and span, linked together by public realm enhancements that improve connectivity across the city. The Deep, designed by Terry Farrell in 1999 and which kicked off the city's transformation, looks imperiously out across the Humber and reminds one that regeneration takes time.

Across the Pennines at Morecombe. Urban Splash refurbished the iconic Midland Hotel and gave some hope to the town back in 2008. They then came up with a further scheme that would revitalise the town. Risk-averse Lancaster City Council turned down the scheme due to “doubts over whether Urban Splash could deliver the scheme given the current state of the economy, and the impact an unfinished scheme could have upon the setting of the Midland Hotel, the conservation area and the Winter Gardens.”
Ten years later, there's a chance that the Eden Project, designed by Grimshaw, might transform Morecambe’s seafront and kick-start regeneration more widely in Morecambe, having been given some £50m of Levelling Up money. The project aims to “reimagine what a seaside destination can offer.”

Culture has been a strong driver for the regeneration of Margate. Turner Contemporary was kicked off by Kent County Council back in 2001. After a false start with an unbuildable design by Snohetta, David Chipperfield’s design was completed in 2011. Tracey Emin has played an essential role in promoting the town's cultural offer, attracting young families fleeing London's high house prices.

The rebirth of Folkestone is the brainchild of Sir Roger De Haan, a native son and former owner of Saga. His charitable trust has spent an estimated £100 million investing in Folkestone. Shoreline Crescent, by Acme architects, marks the first phases of the 1,000 homes development along the half-mile stretch of beach and harbour. The regen project is helped by the fact that it takes just 54 minutes by HS1 to reach London St Pancras – over half an hour less than the commute to Margate.

Culture is a common factor in these examples, which is where London is lucky. We have always had a world-beating range of theatres, galleries and museums, but there are improvements on their way – East Bank at Stratford will transform the QEOP, the City of London's spectacular London Museum and the renewal of the Barbican Centre will play an essential role in attracting more people to the Square Mile. Waltham Forest, the first Borough of Culture, has long-term ambitions to establish the borough as a cultural destination building on venues like the William Morris Gallery, Fellowship Square and the Soho Theatre Walthamstow.

The lesson I take from my ride is that regenerative doesn’t happen overnight. Positive development is important – don’t let the place rot like the Grand Hotel. Good public transport, placemaking and infrastructure are essential, as are imaginative politicians, but culture is critical to bringing the whole together, reinforcing communities and attracting business.

By that time the lines were beginning to blur, building design became more catholic, PoMo and the Prince had widened the style debate - let a thousand flowers bloom they said.

For a long time, the traditionalists bagged the word beauty, a word many architects found hard to stomach. Firmness commodity and delight were fine to describe good architecture, they thought.

Then at the end of last year, the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust launched its Building Beauty Awards which might just help designers to use the B word without embarrassment. Chairman of the RFACT and its award jurors is design guru Stephen Bayley who for many years has investigated the meaning of beauty, even proposing a major exhibition at the V&A on the subject.

Philosopher Simon May, a Trustee of RFACT, suggests that the awards remind us that beauty is not only defined by Aristotelian concepts of harmony, proportion and symmetry but by a wider response that can be anchored in the time and place we inhabit.

In that context the winners were the exceptionally beautiful bridge at Tintagel Castle by William Matthews and Ney and Partners; McGrath Road housing by Peter Barber; the River of Light by Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands and Leo Villarreal and the Tower of Light in Manchester by Tonkin Liu. These give Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Levelling Up who references Poundbury as his example of beautiful architecture, a wider vocabulary of references in future.

There’s a chapter on Beauty in a new book by OMA partner Reinier de Graaf, a very readable romp through many of the issues facing architecture today from iconitis to sustainability, from architecture for health to places for people. The chapter on Beauty is entitled The B Word recognising the difficulty many architects have in using it in full. De Graaf's writing is well-researched, journalistic in tone and without the sort of critical position one might have expected from a partner of OMA. However, he does not come across as a fan of the Building Beautiful Building Better Commission (BBBBC) whose report he quotes: “It should no longer be assumed that the people are to be led by the architects and the planners other than the other way round”. Graaf responds by referring to Tom Wolfe and Jane Jacobs who both broached the subject but neither contemplated the notion of a consensual notion of beauty. “Linking the two," writes de Graaf “it seems a small step from democracy to populism.”

Another new book which is highly relevant to this debate is No Free Parking by Nicholas Boys Smith an affectionate tour of the streets of London featured on the Monopoly Board. Nick is the founder of Create Streets but also the co-chair alongside the late Sir Roger Scruton of the BBBBC and Chair of the Office for Place at DLUHC. His book is a hugely enjoyable read for all London - and Monopoly - buffs. I was personally disappointed that he didn’t give more attention to Temple Bar and its importance to Fleet Street but I agree with his sentiments about the permanence of London’s streets in shaping the city “Where Celts and Romans journeyed, where we drive, so people of the future and far future will also travel.”

It made me think about what a complex job Nick has in promoting beauty in government. London is not an ordered classical beauty like Paris or Rome, its streets are a gallimaufry of styles, shapes and sizes. It is a city of clashing typologies rather than of harmony. That’s what makes it such an interesting and exciting place - but is it beautiful?

Perhaps this was solved at the RIBA’s event entitled Beauty: Who Cares, Wins! (held after NLQ went to press) and organised by Paul Monaghan, an advisor for the Government’s Office for Place and partner in AHMM, and which includes an exploration of ‘what is beauty?’ By the cheerful classicist Robert Adam, Stephen Bayley and LendLease’s Selina Mason.

“How do we define beauty at a local level, how can design standards be set to encourage more beautiful development and how can we demonstrate that what is built, is popular with local people?”
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We must be encouraged that raising the bar of design quality is now central to DLUHC policies. Design Codes and the NPPF will hopefully curb the depredations of the worst volume house builders, but whether we’ll get an agreement on what beauty means rests in the balance. ​

 
But its fate is changing, it is about to be “brought back into civic use” as recent Lord Mayor Sir Charles Bowman put it.
 
Here’s the background: Stuart Murphy was the Chief Architect in the City of London until 1985 when his role was taken over by the newly appointed Director of Planning Peter Rees. As part of the RIBA’s 150th anniversary celebrations in 1984, Murphy had been instrumental in setting up the Worshipful Company of Chartered Architects as a member of the Livery - the ancient and modern trade associations and guilds that play a key role in the governance of the City.
 
In 1974 the then Lord Mayor  of London Sir Hugh Wontner told Murphy “if you can bring Temple Bar back to the City of London you can have it as the hall for your new company.”
 
At that time, Temple Bar was languishing in Hertfordshire having been removed from its original location in Fleet Street in 1878 to ease the flow of traffic. The Corporation of London, had dismantled the building piece-by-piece and stored its 2,700 stones until in 1880 when the brewer Henry Meux, bought the stones and re-erected the arch at his home in Theobalds Park.
 
A century later it was falling into disrepair and there were moves to try and get it back. In 2001 the Court of Common Council agreed to fund the return of Temple Bar to the Square Mile and its reconstruction in Paternoster Square was completed in November 2004 by the developers Mitsubishi Estates and Stanhope. But by that time Murphy had died and the idea of the Architects’ Company taking over Temple Bar seemed to have been forgotten.
 
In 2015 I became the Master of the Architects’ Company and decided to follow up on Sir Hugh’s promise. So we formed a stand-alone charity – the Temple Bar Trust of which I am Chair - and set about creating a space that would not only act as the City Livery’s smallest Hall but deliver an education programme, lectures and tours as well as house committee meetings and dinners.
 
The City Corporation has given us a CIL Neighbourhood grant to provide an educational programme for the “local community, children and visitors”.
Temple Bar was the traditional western gateway to the City of London; in its new location, it is a metaphorical gateway, where people can learn about the City’s architecture and heritage before embarking on their visits and tours of the Square Mile. The Trust will organise a regular programme of talks about the City aimed at a general audience, young people, and students of architecture. Temple Bar will again become the ‘Gateway to the City’ by introducing visitors to its architectural heritage, the Wren Churches and the Livery Halls, as well as its modern architecture.
 
Students planning a career in architecture will be offered lectures and mentoring by experienced professionals. We’ll teach school children about the environment, climate change and careers in architecture.
 
Visitors to the City will form an even more important part of the Square Mile’s economy in the post-covid environment with more and more people working from home for a big part of the week.
 
The building is currently undergoing refurbishment and will be officially opened by HRH The Duke of Gloucester in September, although events will be taking place over the summer as this year we are celebrating the 350th anniversary of the completion of the building. Next year is Wren 300 marking the anniversary of the death of Christopher Wren - so we foresee a busy time ahead.

Until COVID came along the majority of the work that NLA did was through physical interaction, lectures, seminars round tables. All in person. Only our global city dialogues were virtual, organised at great expense with cameramen, technicians and a studio audience. These physical events would invariably fill our lecture hall, so would be seen by a satisfyingly substantial maximum of 220.
 
Since lockdown the NLA film on the history of the City of London has doubled its viewership to 200,000; videos of Don’t Move Improve! Winners have been seen by tens of thousands of people. Our programmes now boast the sort of numbers that were the preserve of social media.
 
The discussion of where and when we are going to work in the future, how much time will we spend on WFH and how we will use our newfound skills in virtual communications are subjects that are taxing organisations around the world.
 
There are many instances where zoom will remain a part of my work practice – reducing overseas travel to meetings, inviting overseas speakers to events and calling group meetings. While physical interaction is generally preferable, convenience, cost and carbon favour the virtual.
 
So I’ll continue to do Zoom interviews with interesting people but will also video physical meetings and visits to buildings. Learning from vloggers on YouTube and social media I realised how technology has enabled the relative amateur to deliver decent quality video. The amazing technical spec of the iPhone 11pro provides stabilised filming, huge memory, Bluetooth-enabled microphones and a handful of lighting rigs and gizmos from Amazon provide a level of technical support that a decade ago would have been the province of the specialised professional. Editing software is similarly accessible.
 
So new technology allows me to share things that I do as a part of my job in different ways. As a writer, I would transcribe interviews with architects, developers and clients. Now I can video them. I would have the pleasure of being shown around a new building by the architect. Now, with my iPhone, microphones and LED lighting, I can film them as I follow them around and share them with NLA’s now international audience.
 
Once printing was the province protective unionisation, then along came offset litho and opened the world of magazines to a new generation of publishers. The internet did the same a couple of decades later and magazines that on paper were seen by tens of thousands of readers were soon being viewed by hundreds of thousands.
 
While the technology for video conferencing has been around for some time, it took COVID to get everyone onto Zoom or Teams.
 
Physical interaction and presence will remain an essential part of our relationship with workmates, clients and connections. I have been encouraged by the number of people now visiting the NLA model during its residency at Coal Drops Yard at Kings Cross. During the COVID recovery period, we decided to be more agile, to move to different parts of the city and help activate places and spaces. At Coal Drops Yard we are more accessible to a wider audience than we have ever been. Ten times the number of the general public visit us than did before to find out more about how London is changing and developing.
 
COVID has been horrible, but it has accelerated change and created new opportunities for expression. It has changed the mediums we use as well as the messages they carry.

I cycled across the Isle of Sheppey to Sheerness with its busy port handling motor cars and fruit and veg. It's on the edge of England, and it feels it. Through Gillingham and Chatham struggling towns that lost the navy and have yet to find alternative economic drivers. Like most settlements in the Thames Estuary they contain neighbourhoods with higher levels of deprivation and unemployment than the rest of England.
 
On the north bank of the Thames, I got stuck on the dual carriageway that leads down to DP World London Gateway deep-sea container terminal; huge lorries stacked with containers roared up and down. Not great for cycling but an encouraging sign of economic growth.
 
It was nearly 30 years ago that Michael Heseltine, then Secretary of State for the Environment. proposed plans for developing what was then called the East Thames Corridor, a regional planning project inspired by Sir Peter Hall’s idea of a linear city on the north and south banks of the estuary.  John Prescott,  Deputy Prime Minister after Labour was elected in 1997, liked the idea and, badged as Thames Gateway, the vision was a key part of the Blair Government’s regeneration agenda.
 
Since then the area has consistently been unable to deliver the same levels of economic growth as other parts of the UK. The success of pockets of development at Canary Wharf and the estuary’s ports have not been felt across the area. In 2018 the Thames Estuary 2050 Growth Commission proposed focussing on five growth areas: the City Ribbon (London); Inner Estuary, South Essex foreshore, North Kent foreshore, and the River Thames. What Chairman John Armitt called “a tapestry of productive places along a global river”.
 
Then last year the Government set up The Thames Estuary Growth Board which claims in its report 'The Green Blue'  that working as one unified voice, it “will deliver the greenest and most productive estuary in the world.”
 
Its plans include a freeport, increased use of the river to carry more passengers and freight; safeguarding wharves and piers; hydrogen infrastructure and digital infrastructure.
 
There is some progress:  Highways England is about to put in its application for the Lower Thames Crossing, east of Gravesend - the longest road tunnel in the UK; a competition was announced recently for an £8bn masterplan for Thamesmead; the City Markets are due to move to Barking in 2025;  Ebbsfleet Garden City is growing; the Dagenham Studios are on track as part of the Estuary Production Corridor and I am told that the Growth Board will be announcing new plans for the region soon. In a recent interview with Barking and Dagenham Leader Darren Rodwell told me “ I very much champion the Green Blue report,” and with characteristic understatement described Barking and Dagenham as the “gateway to the world.”
 
I cycled on through Leigh on Sea which has been home to a successful estuarial industry for two hundred years. It is the capital of the Thames Estuary cockle-harvesting business. Up until the 1980s cockles were raked from the sands by hand but today vacuum dredgers suck them up by the ton. While some of the catch goes to the Whelk Stalls of east London, most are exported to Italy and Spain. While cockle hoovering is not going to provide any of the new jobs the Growth Board are seeking, I found its resilience as a local business most encouraging.

I cycled through Jaywick Sands before hitting the seafront at Clacton. I had first heard about Jaywick when it was featured in an issue of Archigram many years ago. As I recall the magazine celebrated the informal architecture of the place and the interventions made to the bungalows and shacks by their occupants. The nearest thing in England to favelas and barriadas. The Archigram Group had probably been pointed in the direction of Jaywick by the Bartlett history Professor and writer Reyner Banham who lectured on the Essex settlement to his architecture students. More recently the poorly-serviced plotland development that once provided a place of escape for east Londoners has been named the most deprived town in the UK and in 2015 was featured in the Channel 5 programme 'Benefits by the Sea.' Today, there seems to be little evidence of the delights of customisation.    
In comparison to Southend's 2kms long pier, Clacton-on-Sea's is a minnow at 360m. In her excellent book, Excellent Essex, Gillian Darley describes the role of entrepreneurial engineer Peter Bruff in the founding of the town. The pier opened in 1873 and visitors would arrive by sea. In the 1860s Bruff had developed Walton-on-the-Naze as a seaside resort and built a railway line connecting it to Ipswich.
Before I got to Clacton I had stopped briefly in Rayleigh to take a phone call; as I moved off I dropped a small bag with my video memory cards, AirPod and GoPro chargers inside. I was ten miles down the road to Colchester before I realised what had happened and hotfooted it back to the spot where I stopped, but no bag to be seen! I set off again and was another ten miles down the road when I received a phone call. "I'm Holly Street, my father has found a bag with your name in it." I didn't have time to make another trip into Rayleigh so I arranged for the bag to be sent to my home. Thanks, Holly! and Holly's dad.

From Clacton to Frinton-on-Sea was a lovely ride along their nice wide promenade with a following wind. I had to make a slight detour for the no cycling request as the route narrowed as it came to a row of beach huts perched out over the sea.

Overlooking the sea at Frinton is the Frinton Park Estate  which was planned in the 1930s to include 1,100 houses, a town hall, college, churches, a shopping complex, and  hotel. Oliver Hill was the principal architect and selected a stellar group of young, progressive architects, including Wells Coates, Maxwell Fry, Tecton, FRS Yorke and Frederick Gibberd to design sections of the estate. But the project foundered. The modernist, experimental design and such as concrete construction proved difficult to sell. Only about 35  houses  were built; Oliver Hill had designed 12 of them , of which ten survive. The style is more popular now and a number of the houses have been restored.