The London skyline: What did the foreigners ever do for us?

RIGHT! Quiz time!

Question one: Where is the only thatched roof in London? (The picture is a bit of a giveaway for anyone who knows Bankside). Answer: Shakespeare’s Globe.

Question two: Who was the tireless campaigner who defeated municipal naysayers to recreate the theatre just yards from its original site. Answer: Sam Wanamaker.

Question three: And what was Wanamaker’s nationality? Answer: he was an American.

That’s right. It took a foreigner to seize the opportunity to embellish London with this tribute to England’s bard when the locals were all saying it wasn’t feasible. “What has Shakespeare ever done for Southwark?” the leader of the local council once asked Wanamaker.

The former actor turned theatre director, chased out of the US in the McCarthy witch hunts, didn’t quite live to see his vision realised in 1996. But he posthumously got his Tudor-style theatre, and he even got the thatch, otherwise banned in London since the 1666 Great Fire.

We Londoners like to think we cherish our architectural glories and culture, but it often takes an outsider to visualise the possibility of a city so little committed to a uniform style.

For sure there are familiar elements, like London bricks, that add to its overall character. But it took 18th century French Huguenot silk-weavers to fashion them into some of the city’s finest houses that still survive in Spitalfields.

In more recent times, architects such as the Hungarian-born adopted Londoner Ernö Goldfinger stamped their mark on post-war London with their Modernist, Brutalist towers.

Not everyone was a fan. The prickly Marxist was furious when Ian Fleming appropriated his name, and some say his character traits, for his Bond villain Auric Goldfinger.

Later still came Zaha Hadid, Iraqi-born and another adopted Londoner, who gave us the Serpentine Gallery and the London Aquatics Centre used for the 2012 Olympics.

London is a jackdaw of a city when it comes to design. We’ve borrowed the baroque and the classical, the modern and the brutal. Behind the Tower of London, built by a Norman, we’ve got the Gherkin and the Cheesegrater and the Walkie Talkie, and right opposite is the Qatari-owned Shard, designed by an Italian, Renzo Piano.

It’s unlikely he would have got to plonk it in the middle of his native Genoa but then London has always been more mix than match.

A French friend recently noted that in the average terrace in the City of London there are rarely two buildings in the same style. He sort of liked it.

The Globe, of course, is a one-off, not least because of the thatch. In 2008, a bunch of thatchers turned up with 800 bundles of sedge from the Norfolk Broads and 10,000 English hazel spars to repair it.

The theatre was sadly shuttered today. Just a few people were jogging past – no! don’t start me on that again!

The annual Shakespeare season is threatened but, if you’re interested, you can catch up with past productions online.