London is growing skywards. With the high rental price for offices and a lack of space in the ‘square mile’ of the old City of London going up is the only practical alternative. Because of the soft clay in which London was built the maximum height of a skyscraper in the city used to be around 600 feet (200 metres) but new technology allows architects to design buildings – such as Enzo Piano’s The Shard – which are around 1000 feet (300 metres) high with further high rise structures being built and planned for the future.

The main attraction in Vauxhall is a building you cannot enter. Vauxhall Cross is the headquarters of the Special Intelligence Services (formerly MI6) and the employer of Britain’s most famous fictional secret agent, James Bond, often referred to simply by the number 007. The double 00 prefix indicates that Bond has a ‘licence to kill’, an invention of his creator Ian Fleming who worked for Naval Intelligence during the Second World War when the double 0 symbol indicated that a document was classified as ‘top secret.’