As London faces a barrage of bulky towers, with 230 tall buildings planned to shoot up across the city over the coming months, here are 10 of the capital's best examples of aiming high. They prove that big doesn't necessarily mean bad, and that not every tower has to be an icon, topped with a jaunty profile or dressed in a jazzy outfit to succeed. After calling out 10 of the worst offenders last week, here's our run-down of the top 10 model performers, in the hope that some lessons might be learned from their success.

10. Natwest Tower

Location: City of London | Floors: 47 | Height: 183m | Architect: Richard Seifert | Status: Completed 1980 | Use: Office

Photograph: David Levene Photograph: David Levene

Dressed in sleek silvery pin-stripes, the Natwest Tower (now Tower 42) stands with an air of suave simplicity compared to some of the more recent arrivals to the City. After a 10-year saga of construction, costing the equivalent of £230m to build in today's money, it was the tallest building in the country for a decade after completion, and the tallest building in the City for more than 30 years, until it was overtaken by the Heron Tower in 2009. Designed to resemble the Natwest logo from above, it is formed from three interlocking chevrons, extruded into a staggered cluster, with the shallow office floor-plates cantilevered out from a central concrete core. A high-tech wonder, it featured the UK's first double-decker lifts, as well as a “mail train” for distributing documents around the building.

9. Economist Plaza

Location: St James's | Floors: 16 | Height: 53m | Architect: Alison & Peter Smithson | Status: Completed, 1964. Grade II* listed | Use: Office & residential

An essay in how tall buildings can be successfully knitted into London's streets and provide a decent civic space at ground level, the Economist Plaza is the work of arch-Brutalists Alison and Peter Smithson, architects of the doomed Robin Hood Gardens estate in east London. While that faces the wrecking ball, the Economist complex is regarded as their masterpiece, “one of the most successful examples of urban design to be seen anywhere,” according to American architectural historian Vincent Scully, who said it was “among the most important buildings of the decade.” Framed by carefully proportioned elevations, the central square is described by English Heritage as “one of London's most memorable modern spaces, offering subtle intimations of the Greek agora, the Italian piazza and the alleys and courts of Georgian London.”



8. Mansion House Square

Location: Poultry | Floors: 20 | Height: 88m |

Architect: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | Status: Proposed, 1969. Unbuilt | Use: Office

Where the cartoon cruise-liner of James Stirling's No 1 Poultry now stands, jutting its cheeky prow towards the Bank of England, might instead have risen the slick bronzed slab of Mies van der Rohe's only project in the UK – if Prince Charles and his chums hadn't had their way. After a 25-year campaign to see it built by developer Peter Palumbo, an ardent collector of modernist houses, the scheme was turned down at public inquiry in 1985. Labelled “a glass stump better suited to downtown Chicago” by the Prince, who was an old polo team mate of the Palumbo's, the tower would have been an intelligent use of the site, freeing up space at street level for a new public square. Imagined as a place for festivals and exhibitions, this piazza would have been framed by the grand facades of the surrounding buildings, opening up views of Mansion House, Lutyens' Midland Bank and the Wren church of St Stephen Walbrook.

7. South Quay Plaza

Location: Canary Wharf | Floors: 36 & 73 | Height: 250m | Architect: Norman Foster | Status: Proposed | Use: Residential

Image: Foster & Partners/Berkeley Homes Photograph: Foster & Partners / Berkeley Homes

Like two proud sentinels rising above the surrounding din, Foster's “toothpick towers” are a model of refinement. The tallest residential buildings in the country, they will contain 900 flats sprouting out of a 1.5 acre public park. Designed as two squares in plan, interlocking at their corners where the circulation core is housed, the towers' glass facades are each split in two, giving the impression of a conjoined cluster of six impossibly slender shafts. The project echoes Foster's design for 610 Lexington Avenue in New York, which joins a growing number of sleek pencil towers rising across the city. London's tall buildings would do well to learn from Manhattan, a skyline that has been driven by strict regulations and an understanding that not every tower needs to shout.

6. Trellick Tower

Location: Ladbroke Grove | Floors: 31 | Height: 98m | Architect: Erno Goldfinger | Status: Completed 1972. Grade II* listed | Use: Residential

Trellick Tower Photograph: VIEW Pictures Ltd/Alamy Photograph: VIEW Pictures Ltd / Alamy/Alamy

A pixelated cliff-face of bush-hammered concrete soaring above the prim terraced streets of Notting Hill, Trellick Tower has become a west London icon, reproduced on cushions and bags, its brute force transposed into comforting kitsch. Designed by Hungarian-born emigre Ernö Goldfinger as social housing for the Greater London Council, its 200 flats are cleverly arranged in stacked streets, connected by sky-bridges to a freestanding circulation core. Based on his earlier design for the Balfron Tower in Poplar, the slim service tower is punctuated by thin arrow-slit windows and topped with a glass boiler-house, giving the complex a medieval sci-fi look.

5. One Wood Wharf

Location: Canary Wharf | Floors: 55 | Height: 154m | Architect: Herzog & de Meuron | Status: Proposed | Use: Residential

Image: Herzog & de Meuron Photograph: Herzog & de Meuron

Like a knobbly stick of white coral poking out from the Canary Wharf's thicket of glass slabs, One Wood Wharf will be an original new residential addition to the financial centre by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron, creators of Tate Modern. Pixelated like a cylindrical stack of sugar cubes, the building expresses the individual apartments within the overall complex, the units shuffled in and out of the facade to create balconies and terraces of varying sizes. The different apartment types are layered in groups, creating a series of vertical neighbourhoods, each offset to form a spiral of big bay windows up the facade.

4. Barbican Estate

Location: City of London | Floors: 42 | Height: 123m | Architect: Chamberlin, Powell & Bon | Status: Completed 1969. Grade II listed | Use: Residential

Towers of flats at the Barbican Centre, London. Photograph: David Levene Photograph: David Levene/Guardian

With their serrated balconies sawing at the clouds, the Barbican towers cast an imposing presence on the skyline, bringing a dash of Blade Runner excitement to the City fringe. Conceived as a brave new Belgravia, to bring the professional classes back to the middle of the City, the Barbican rose from the rubble of a blitz bomb-site as a self-contained walled city, a 40-acre vertical paradise of housing, offices, shops and schools, all floating above a cavernous plinth of cultural facilities. Declared “one of the wonders of the modern world” by the Queen, when she finally opened it in 1982, it has since gone on to top the polls of London's most reviled buildings – despite its panoramic flats swapping hands for many millions.

3. Centre Point

Location: Tottenham Court Road | Floors: 33 |

Height: 117m | Architect: Richard Seifert |

Status: Completed 1967. Grade II listed | Use: Office & residential

Photograph: Headline photo agency Photograph: Headline photo agency

A sparkling white beacon at the crossroads of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road, Centre Point's slender profile and sharply sculpted facade is a refreshing antidote to the acres of curtain-wall glass stretched across fattened slabs that have popped up around the city since it was built. With bold op-art patterning and finely tailored lines of a Mary Quant dress, it embodied the spirit of 60s London – as Building magazine commented at the time, “more than any other building Centre Point made the city swing”. But it was not to everyone's taste. Nikolaus Pevsner described it as “coarse in the extreme,” while John Betjeman referred to its “flashy and international style of crystalline concrete.” For years it stood empty, seen as a brash monument to the greed of its developer, property tycoon Harry Hyams.

2. The Shard

Location: London Bridge | Floors: 72 | Height: 300m | Architect: Renzo Piano | Status: Completed 2012 | Use: Office, hotel, residential

Photograph: Guy Corbishley/Demotix/Corbis Photograph: Guy Corbishley/Guy Corbishley/Demotix/Corbis

The Shard is an unearthly sight on the south London horizon, a fractured crystalline spear like something hurtled from planet Krypton. At times a leaden pyramid, at others a gleaming spire, it is a beguiling barometer of the city's changeable weather – recently dissolving into a holographic apparition in the sun-lit fog. Loved and loathed in equal measure, it is an apt symbol of the city's accidental planning system, the result of a plucky gamble by a man who had never built anything taller than industrial sheds in Portsmouth and Warrington. Bailed out by Qatar, the building has stood mostly empty since completion. For all its grace on the horizon, it is clumsy where it meets the ground, turning its back on the street in a jumble of canopies and blank walls.

1. The Gherkin

Location: St Mary Axe | Floors: 41 | Height: 180m | Architect: Norman Foster | Status: Completed 2003 | Use: Office

Photograph: David Levene Photograph: David Levene

Also likened to a pine cone, a bullet and a stubby cigar – and perhaps least like its knobbly pickled namesake – the Gherkin was a mischievous arrival to the City skyline in 2003. A lovable, chubby creature, it has stood the test of time, holding its own in an increasingly choked cluster. Wrapped with a diagrid structure that makes it look like it's bulging out of a pair of fishnet stockings, its rounded form was justified for reasons of aerodynamics (might it lift off?) and internal ventilation. All who have claimed credit for its design have gone on to more disappointing things – from Ken 'the pen' Shuttleworth to Robin Partington, both of whose excrescences frequently grace the shortlist for the Carbuncle Cup. Its current owners have put it up for sale, an announcement that was every headline-writer's dream: Gherkin's salad days over amid financial pickle for London tower. Anyone got a spare £500m?

