Our capital, for better or worse, has become the pre-eminent global city, and from high culture to bars, spas and clubs, our pleasure industry is a driver of that prosperity. In this extract from his new book, Slow Burn City, Rowan Moore looks at London as a wonderland for all tastes, if not all pockets…

Slow Burn City describes London in the early 21st century, the global city above all others, whose land and homes are tradeable commodities on international markets, a transit lounge and stopping-off point for the world’s migrant populations, all to an extent greater than anywhere else. It is dazzling and exciting but also struggles to deal with the pressures created by its success. It is unable to offer many of its citizens a decent home, and its best qualities are threatened by speculation. Modern London tests to the limit the idea that, when it comes to the growth and organisation of a city, the free market knows best. London is a New Sybaris of entertainment, art, fashion, cuisine and multiple refinements of pleasure, and a place of invention and opportunity where people are desperate to live…

If, as cliche has it, skyscrapers are penile, then where am I now, in the express elevator of the Heron Tower, on the way to its rooftop bar? And what am I, hurtling upwards, with others? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The city skyline from the Heron Tower, far left, then, left to right, NatWest Tower, the Gherkin and the Cheesegrater. Photograph: Alamy

At pavement level one passes the glass wall of a high reception area, with escalators and a truck-sized fish tank, before reaching a velvet rope and name-checks. Next a lobby as tight as the aquarium was ample, and then the ascent, in an all-glass lift attached to the side of the tower, such that the streets of the City of London and then the rest of the capital unfurl around us. The rate of acceleration and degree of vertigo are just shy of nauseating, it being undesirable to spoil our appetite on the way to the rooftop restaurant. But there is still a mild test of nerve, appropriate to the risk-taking financial capital of the world.

A community of cocktail drinkers is created 200m high, for which the rest of the city is atmosphere

On reaching the top we privileged homunculi pass through some tortuous corridors before entering a bar with a view of a terrace occupied by a tree aflame with an electric autumn of orange light. There are views of the Heron’s companion towers, the Gherkin and Tower 42, Vegas-lit at their tips to announce that here too are Pleasure zones. A community of cocktail drinkers is created 200 metres into the air, for which the rest of the city – the bars and clubs of Shoreditch to the north, the suburbs stretching east towards Essex – becomes atmosphere, a background lighting effect.

If you continue straight on you reach the restaurant, a generous volume ceiled with a geodesic-looking lattice of thick curved bamboo. There are also hints of Oscar Niemeyer: as its name suggests, Sushisamba fuses culinary influences from Japan and Brazil, so the decor follows suit. A would-be enchanting space is formed by fragments of different sorts of nature – twigs, a crystal forest, the bamboo, the contents of plate and glass wherein slivers of flavour and texture have been sourced and combined from across the world to deliver tiny empires of experience, synaesthetic microsymphonies of look, taste, feel, scent and even, in the surprising crunches that detonate amid smoother sensations, sound. There are clouds. A sculptural object in the ceiling resembles crystallised vapour, lights gather in cumuli, and puffs of foam, el Bulli-style, float over the food. A dish of opaque fluid invites you to fish in it, as in a delicate swamp.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cocktails at dusk: the Sushisamba bar on the 38th floor of the Heron Tower in Bishopsgate. Photograph: Ming Tang-Evans

In London, as in other major cities, the arts of distraction have reached an unprecedented level of sophistication. If a cataclysm were to hit now, future generations would marvel at our own time’s range and ingenuity of food, drink, art, design and performance, of spas, bars, shops and clubs. Some are aimed at the rich, some are available to the reasonably well off or to the large number of childless professionals with disposable income. Some, thanks to public art galleries and sponsored events, are free.

In a few weeks in one summer, for example, it was possible for a newspaper journalist to sample the following:

A visit to the London Coliseum, originally the biggest of the many Edwardian music halls designed by the genius of such things Frank Matcham; there they are screening River of Fundament, a six-hour film by the artist Matthew Barney, with orchestral score by Jonathan Bepler, on themes of life, death, rebirth, excrement, cars, ancient Egypt, Norman Mailer’s worst novel and the suicide of Ernest Hemingway. Spa treatment at the Ironmonger Row Turkish Baths (established in 1931 by the London borough of Finsbury, now run by the charitable social enterprise GLL). Delectable dim sum and artful multicultural cocktails in the darkly soothing basement bar of the Michelin-starred Hakkasan restaurant, restricting the budgetary impact by not permitting oneself expectations of a hearty meal. Walks in Wanstead Park, Epping Forest, Victoria Park. Swimming in the Olympic Aquatic Centre, designed by Zaha Hadid, and in the open-air lido in London Fields. Seeing some movies, some rented from an arthouse DVD shop in Brick Lane. Watching famous footballers in a north London stadium. Sampling Turkish, Pakistani, Szechuan, Vietnamese and Persian food, all good, none expensive, most with a fresh, invigorating pungency that could be called authentic, in Stoke Newington, Dalston, Whitechapel and Green Street. Eating in a rooftop pop-up Italian restaurant in Hackney, an actor from Friends at the next table. Listening to music at the experimental venue Cafe Oto, in a space created by the young architectural collective Assemble. Experiencing interactions with the Belgrade-born performance artist Marina Abramović at the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, and visiting the gallery’s temporary annual pavilion, designed by the architect Smiljan Radić, a heavy/light, Palaeolithic space-age combination of rocks and fibreglass. Standing in a crowd in the early hours outside Selfridges in Oxford Street, amid men with Edward VII beards, George V trims and Henry V haircuts, until admitted past two white horses mounted by skinny riders body-painted white, to a misty concrete deck with half-naked barmen and trans women strutting in beams of light, the whole being a Fashion Week party for the Californian-Parisian designer Rick Owens.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Designer Rick Owens and his wife, Michele Lamy, attend the London Fashion Week party at Selfridges to celebrate Owens’s show. Photograph: David M. Benett/Getty Images for Selfridges

Not all these experiences will be to everyone’s taste – not all, indeed, were to the journalist’s – but they are a sample of the diversity and invention with which London daily and nightly strives to de-jade the appetites of its inhabitants. Some are built on the inheritance of past benefactions, some occupy spaces intended for other purposes. Some – the pungent meals – exemplify ways in which immigration has enriched London. Some are works of love, of cooks or artists who want to do their best with their media, others of calculation, some of both. There is both brilliance and pretension in the list. Many of these diversions consume references, memories and ideas, intellectual and physical material, with greedy promiscuity.

In this eroto-economic theory of town planning, pleasure is an end in itself, a source of personal identity and freedom

Peter Rees, for 28 years the chief planner of the City of London, under whom projects such as Heron Tower were encouraged and approved, started late in his career to tell stories of his experiences visiting leather bars in east London. On one occasion he left a bar to find a group of Bengali teenagers fascinated with his street-parked Porsche. Some tension might be thought present in this situation – poor area, posh car, gay man, Muslim boys – but in Rees’s telling he let the teenagers photograph themselves with the car and in the driving seat, which delighted them, before the parties went their separate ways. For Rees, this sort of encounter is the essence of London: it has always been a place where a minority could find succour; gay, religious, whatever you might be, you could come into the East End of London and the East End of London would tolerate almost anything, within a very limited set of local rules which were community-run. That spirit has produced a London that is the world’s best party – the railway arches from Battersea to Bermondsey are full of gay saunas, discos, bars… all sorts of weird and wonderful things are going on in those railway arches because there are enough people of any particular persuasion or interest in London to take a marginal space and come together in it. That in turn attracts more people. Twenty-, thirtysomethings come for the party. They only get the job to pay for the party.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘There are enough people of any particular persuasion or interest in London to take a marginal space and come together in it.’ Photograph: Alamy

In this eroto-economic theory of town planning, pleasure is an end in itself, a source of personal identity and freedom and an engine of the city’s prosperity. The theory combines social and economic liberalism, both individual choice and competitive exploitation, in a way that is not in the end so surprising from a planner who promoted the growth of the City of London’s towers: that’s how Shoreditch came about, that’s how Vauxhall came about, that’s how Soho existed for many years until the degree of control started to become oppressive. Or Shepherd Market in Mayfair.

You can go right back in history. The centres of doing naughty things or doing things that aren’t the family norm are very much part of a great city and the degree of tolerance and provision for alternative lifestyles actually determine the degree of creativity and adaptability and futureproofing that a city will have.

To know better the economic driver Rees describes, I find myself in a pleasant garden in the area celebrated by the poet John Betjeman as Metro-Land, the north-western corridor of suburbia that grew up along what is now the Metropolitan underground line. Close by are the steep, bucolic slopes of Gladstone Park (opened 1901) and Dollis Hill synagogue, all concrete, with stars of David and menorahs abstracted into hexagons and inverted arches, a quirky work of 1936-8 by the engineer-architect Owen Williams (the black glass Daily Express building in Fleet Street; Empire Pool Wembley; Pioneer Health Centre in Peckham; some clunky bridges over an early motorway, the M1 , phase one).

I am talking to Edward, a retired professional about to hit 70, a pillar of the local Jewish community, born in South Africa to Russian parents (“My father worked with Trotsky”). On Wednesdays and Sundays, he says, “there are SBN nights. That’s Stark Bollock Naked. They start at 2.30pm, very convenient if you don’t want to stay up late on Sunday night.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Celebrations during world pride London, inside a Soho sex shop. Photograph: Alamy

Edward and his fiancé like to go to the sex clubs that Rees was talking about, of which the best known are in Vauxhall. They are often in railway arches, because the space is large, cheap, windowless, anonymous and contains noise, and it doesn’t matter when a train goes overhead. They also give the sense of “going into the darker side of life”. The outside will be discreet although with a special enclosure to deal with the fact that the law requires smoking to take place outside, but the clubbers don’t want to be seen from the street naked or nearly so. There might in the low light be “400, 500 guys all looking the same, all dressing the same: well built, a bit of leather and beard, a harness or something. Fashions change… The music is too loud to talk. At my age I’m hard of hearing.

At night Shoreditch is taken over by clubbers. Traffic jams, of both people and cars, form after midnight

“People are celebrating whatever turns them on… you’re enjoying yourself but there can be an undercurrent of desperation that comes from growing up gay and suffering for it… You have sexual urges. You’re open. That’s the best thing of all.”

Edward says that gay sex clubs are more peaceful than the atmosphere that can grow up around straight clubs: “Nobody’s drunk, nobody fights, nobody has a cross word. It’s safe as houses. There’s no aggro. People are friendly. The only problem is overdoses. Clubs search you for GHB. The last thing they want is ambulances being called.” And, when the time comes to put clothes back on and go back into the outside world, they are “Morris dancers to a man, or computer programmers, or bankers. It’s a complete leveller – income level, social background don’t matter… although you might sometimes get a bit of attitude, when gorgeous people don’t want to be touched by less gorgeous people.”

All this is nothing new, to a degree. He cites the molly houses of the 18th century, the effects of the wartime city filled with British and American servicemen, the places described by Joe Orton. But there wasn’t the same array of sex clubs when Edward – married, in the closet, leading a double life – first explored the gay scene “just before Aids started”. There was Subway in Leicester Square – “you heard that you go to this club and you can get something that kills you”. There were bars, but more discreet. There was the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, perhaps the most venerable of gay pubs, into which legend has it Princess Diana was once smuggled, dressed as a man, with the help of Freddie Mercury and Kenny Everett. There were public toilets and Hampstead Heath, in all weathers, including snow.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mardi Gras, 1999, Finsbury Park, London. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

Now, Edward says, the clubbing and bar scenes feed on one another. The more people come, the more attractive these places become. London is a world leader. “People fly in from all over. Paris is less tolerant. Amsterdam doesn’t have the critical mass. Rome has got the Pope in the Vatican. Los Angeles and San Francisco? America doesn’t allow as much as the English do. They have their Bible Belt.” He sees it as part of the city’s wider cultural and economic attractiveness and openness – fashion, art, food, investment – that come from a “stable society and a free society”. “London belongs to the foreigners,” he says. “We the foreigners feel at home. It’s our city, it’s not yours.”

Edward, in short, is describing a world of deregulated international exchange much like London’s banking and property sectors. In the gathering of delights from all nations and the striving for innovation in stimulation, a Vauxhall sex club is not unlike a Sushisamba cocktail. It is different in one respect, however, which is that it is “not exploitative”. Someone must be making good money out of these clubs, but in Edward’s telling more than Rees’s they form an almost utopian republic, where wealth and status fade, apart from the aristocracy of looks. A night, with a free drink, costs £15 or £10 to members, less than going to the movies or the pub, or a single cocktail.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Emma Sayle, founder of exclusive upmarket sex club Killing Kittens: ‘like a Conran Shop for sex’. Photograph: Ian Stratton/ReX/Shutterstock

Elsewhere in London’s contemporary hedonism industry commercial calculation is more apparent. In restaurants and bars beautifully conceived and executed, offering concoctions of sublime craft, and in plenty that do not reach these heights, you can taste the PowerPoint presentations that were made to the investors without whom such things cannot happen – defining the clientele, the differentiation from competitors, the communications strategy, the slicing and layering of the world’s cuisines into a seam rich enough for a new venture to mine.

The more heterosexual sex clubs have also become professionalised businesses. The most publicised is Killing Kittens, founded in 2005. Dedicated to “the relentless pursuit of female desire”, it has been well explored by adventurous young feature writers – to whom I am grateful for sparing me this duty – whose copy usually feels the need to mention that its founder, the “sextrepreneur” Emma Sayle, is a friend of Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge. (They briefly went to the same school and were once photographed in the same dragon-boat crew.)

Much is made of the club’s elite eliteness. “We are very elitist, but that’s what it’s all about,” Sayle told Time Out. “True, not everyone’s a supermodel but all members are attractive, aspirational, successful professionals aged 20-45.” Its parties are held in “smart venues. The rooms are candlelit, we play the right kind of music and it’s black tie, so people are dressed up. There’s often a champagne and oyster reception too, rather than cheese straws… It’s the little things that make a difference.” Not a railway arch in Vauxhall, then, £10 to enter, with 500 heaving bodies. More like a Conran Shop for sex.

In Shoreditch, just north of the preserved viaduct of the defunct Bishopsgate railway station, is a strip now occupied by Boxpark, a “pop-up” shopping centre made of shipping containers, “a unique shopping and dining destination”, according to its self-description, that “places local and global brands side by side”. It is designed to harvest the footfall of this area until it’s replaced by a phalanx of sun-blocking towers of a new development by the property companies Hammerson and Ballymore.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Boxpark pop-up mall in Shoreditch. Photograph: Arcaid Images/Alamy

You can walk from here to the base of Great Eastern Street, where a stair redolent of old-time London dives takes you down to the basement housing Lounge Bohemia, a bar themed on the brown modernism of cold war Prague, which nonetheless serves cocktails beyond the ken of the politburo, which in their elaboration make Sushisamba’s efforts look like cans of Carling: concoctions of cardamom tequila, frankincense, patchouli, “camomile air”, that are served with effects of light and smoke from a bonsai Indiana Jones movie.

If you stay on the pavement you can get a view, south down Bishopsgate, of the Heron Tower, which calls itself a set of “villages” of “boutique offices”. It is one of the earliest and handsomest projects in the millennial London tower boom, a rehabilitation project for the tycoon and ex-con Gerald Ronson, designed when tall buildings had to be on their best architectural behaviour if they wanted to pass a still-sceptical planning regime. It is silvery and well proportioned, its scale articulated and its mass variegated with exposed trusses and lift shafts. By day it doesn’t give much hint of the pleasures at the top. After dark the lurid lighting of the lift shaft gives a clue.

At night Shoreditch is taken over by clubbers. Traffic jams, of both people and cars, form after midnight – kids from state schools and public schools, office workers, dental hygienists, reception teachers, tourists, gay men going to the area’s equivalents of the Vauxhall clubs. The built environment doesn’t lend much encouragement, being old workshops and back offices, with unyielding, treeless streets, but this kind of life doesn’t mind much, indeed enjoys taking over space intended for something else. Good, clean fun – or at least Reesian “naughty things” – is kept within managed limits, once-transgressive attitudes to sex, drugs or music refracted into lifestyle choices. Free society and the free market combine to make an industry of distraction. The import-export businesses of the city of trade extend to transactions of pleasure.

As Rees says, people come to London for its delights and tolerate its inconveniences. In particular they put up with its expensive and restricted supply of housing, the price of which is increased by the desirability of the city. Edward says that there are many people in their late 30s who, unable to afford a house, prefer to flat-share and carry on clubbing when they might otherwise settle down. So there is a circular and addictive aspect: people come for the partying, which helps put up the price of homes, which means they have little by way of domestic space, so they keep on partying.

If you contemplate only London’s buzz and dazzle, you will see that it thrives as never before. This had been a popular narrative among the city’s boosters since the mid-1990s, when a spate of “Cool Britannia” magazine features was converted into political rhetoric by the government of Tony Blair. But to wonder uncritically at these phenomena is to overlook some significant issues.

One is the question whether, as it is governed more and more by the logic of investment, hedonism will stop being fun. If music and desire have something to do with realising yourself, and if eating in a restaurant and drinking in a bar might imply a relationship with the people who make and serve the food and drink, there is much to be lost if such things become pure commodities and we passive consumers.

And, if London’s pleasure industries look like triumphs of entrepreneurial city-making, they are of no use to people without the money or interest to enjoy them. They are not enough in themselves to make an urban society that is enriching and including. They also rely on the great public works of the past – it would not be the party city it is now without the drains, housing, railways, parks, fire codes and planning policies of previous decades and centuries. Modern London dances on the engineering of its ancestors.

© Rowan Moore

This is an edited extract from Slow Burn City by Rowan Moore, published on Thursday by Picador, £20. Click here to buy it for £16