The worst developers of London are not bankers or property companies or local councils. They are academics. London University smashed much of north Bloomsbury. Imperial College wiped out the Imperial Institute and the fine South Kensington terraces around it. Not one London medical school can show a modern building of distinction.

The prize for the capital’s ugliest seat of learning must go to King’s College and the brutalist concrete block that has leered down at St Mary le Strand in Aldwych since 1972. I try to imagine the learned scholars who must have gazed at the plans and exclaimed: “What beauty, what glory are we adding to the London scene.” The stained monster, draped in boastful photographs of college alumni, dribbles on waiting bus queues and stinks of urine.

The building dates from the nadir of London architecture in the third quarter of the 20th century. It was praised in Concrete Quarterly magazine as “seeming almost to merge into the varied street pattern” and “respecting its neighbours in a way unusual for modern buildings”. The architects, named Troup and Steele, compared it with Somerset House nearby.

News that King’s was redeveloping the site was therefore welcome. Perhaps the present academic generation would atone for its forebears by replacing the building with something better. But no, the news is that the block is n ot to be replaced but partnered by another one, demolishing the remaining Strand façades next to it.

An old plan to pedestrianise the Strand between St Mary’s and Somerset House has been abandoned. Far from the “varied street pattern” being restored, bland ugliness is to be increased. The remaining houses running east of Somerset House to the corner of Waterloo Bridge cannot long survive.

If this was some rapacious hedge fund in Mayfair or buy-to-leave fixer in Nine Elms, I am sure King’s staff and students would erupt with righteous anti-capitalist indignation. Yet when the guilty parties consider themselves aesthetes and intellectuals, they appear to claim a licence for ugliness. In this case they are neither aesthetes nor intellectuals, just another property developer on the make.

I have great respect for King’s as a university. It held out for academic standards in the old days when its neighbour, the Left-wing LSE, was going bonkers. Its site is sorely restricted, which is why its medical school, hospital and halls of residence are dispersed. But as a custodian of historic central London its record is appalling.

The site for King’s is on what must once have been a precious secret street, Strand Lane, down to the river, now a wretched service alley that has awaited renovation for half a century. It embraces the last terrace of Georgian and Victorian houses of the vanished Norfolk estate in Surrey Street, including the “Roman Bath” and the exotically derelict Aldwych Tube station. All are in a terrible state.

Clearly the old buildings need renewal but the opportunity should have been taken to replace the Seventies slab and restore some version of the old Strand street line and frontage. What King’s decides to do behind and underground does not matter. Mistakes should be rectified, not compounded.

Immediately to the east of King’s lies one of London’s most tragic corners. The old Norfolk Estate was spared the blitz only to be blitzed by the Norfolk Estate, to the shame of the dukes of that name. In the Sixties Westminster council permitted the demolition of two entire blocks of 18th- and 19th-century town houses from the Strand down to the river. Norfolk Street was wiped out. In their place rose two bland monoliths either side of Arundel Street, on the argument that London needed large office floorplates not residences. Inside one of the blocks was a promised new London square, which has remained padlocked ever since “for security reasons”. Now these awful buildings are themselves being demolished. Surprise, surprise, London “needs residences” after all.

Westminster’s planners have wrecked this bit of the city, presumably because they do not regard it as properly Westminster but somewhere dubbed “mid-town”. They have inexplicably approved the King’s plan, in defiance of the area’s conservation area status. This is the sort of decision that gets local government a bad name.

Within my lifetime a slice of London once rich in character, joining Westminster to the City of London, has all but gone. The Strand was once London’s foreshore. It remains the ceremonial route from the City to the court and Parliament. Its eastern terminus is graced by two of London’s finest churches, St Mary le Strand and St Clement Danes, by Gibbs and Wren. They sail like ships through the Strand traffic, once accompanied by the curving façades of the Strand.

Modern megastructures cannot determine a city’s personality. In London’s case that must lie in the bits in between, in the streets, courts and squares that are still woven by history as threads in the urban tapestry. Ken Livingstone may have dreamed of London as Manhattan, Boris Johnson as Kuala Lumpur. These are not my visions, and I doubt if many Londoners share them.

To the west of King’s lie the glories of Somerset House, on which its governors have long cast an envious eye. Imagine what brutalism they would have tried to inflict on that great institution. Now the college has an opportunity to make amends. Its estate is headed by property tycoon Jamie Ritblat.

I suggest he hop across the road to the LSE, where an equally constrained site is being converted into an excitingly modern urban campus that does not destroy the city. King’s is being outgunned by its old rival. If it cannot do better, it should move elsewhere.