The empirical focus of this paper is a long-running planning controversy associated with attempts to redevelop a site on Bank Junction in the centre of the City of London. These plans faced fierce opposition from those who sought to have the local character of the area, its ‘heritage’, preserved and enhanced. The controversy culminated in the 1980s, a period during which the City and its surrounds were under massive redevelopment pressure in response to various restructurings. The paper provides a contextualised reading of the discursive and representational terrain generated by this controversy. Ostensibly, this was a battle of the old against the new and presents an example of the workings of heritage within contemporary urban settings. But it also marks out the complex intersections between heritage, capital, and identity. This redevelopment struggle became an arena for the expression of the role and status of the City during a time when it was negotiating transformations in its built form and its social fabric as a result of challenging adjustments in its international standing.
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