Boris set to keep Rogers as adviser

It is with some nervousness that I address this stellar gathering

It is true that I did once take a paper in architecture at university but the syllabus ended after the invention of the Corinthian column and before the Romans introduced the arch and though I look up with a delighted eye at many of the revolutionary buildings going up in London my profoundest thought is that I like the crashed mothership by Daniel Libeskind on Holloway Road, and I like the cornices and the triglyphs and the metopes and the caryatids of the more traditional buildings but I have come to the conclusion that I like each more for its proximity to the other.

And the truth is that the crashed mothership would be less interesting without the traditional buildings and the traditional buildings would be less interesting without the crashed mothership and the genius of London architecture lies in this juxtaposition this ability to reinvent old genres and the achievement of British architects is so often to innovate sensitively in the context of an ancient city so that we bring new solutions to old problems.

Because we need this ingenuity, we need your ingenuity if houses and streets and neighbourhoods are better designed then they are likely to be safer and there will be less inequality and the middle classes will send their kids to the local school and if the neighbourhood is pleasing to look at, it is more likely to be protected from vandalism and the environment will be improved.

And that is why I am sure you are all agog to know what is going to be in the London plan! And I cannot tell you tonight. We will be shortly setting out a routemap a blueprint for a blueprint but I can give a few clues.

I am not opposed to all tall buildings and when Barry and Pugin proposed Big Ben I bet there were all sorts of people who howled about monstrous carbuncles and I am sure that there is no one who would want to blow up the House of Commons now - at least not on architectural grounds.

But if I think a tall building is simply out of keeping with the area if the proposal is just gigantism for the sake of gigantism then I will not hesitate to direct refusal. We will be in favour of creating high density without necessarily creating high rises.

I think it shameful that new buildings in London now have among the smallest rooms in Europe and we will be re-establishing the space standards first promoted by the visionary planner Sir Parker Morris in 1961.

We need to build for the long term buildings that people will want to keep for 100 years and not tear down in 30.

Look at some of the housing we are building and ask yourself what are the traditional features of this decade the noughties, the zeroes that yuppies will be rescuing from skips in a century hence.

I do not say that there is no answer. It is just that I haven’t the faintest what those things are but I know that there are people in this room who not only know the answer but who are creating them. And we not only need designers and architects, we need people with the planning vision to make sense of the Thames Gateway.

We can’t just build a dormitory settlement with lots of new roads to get into central London Where is the employment, the community infrastructure? Why not make it a centre for environmental industries an exciting base for companies and a way of bringing skilled jobs to a deprived part of the city?

And what about the Ramblas, the beaches along the Thames, the use of river transport, the bicycle superhighways, the joining up of the parks to make a walk, the hanging gardens of the South Bank? And what about making use of the 24 million cubic meters of soil that we’ll be digging up from Crossrail to make new urban hills and all the other dreams of ambitious mayors.

Augustus may have found Rome of brick and left it of marble but when he had a problem of urban planning he had Agrippa to sort it out. "Get Agrippa", as he doubtless shouted to his henchmen.

Well, I am delighted to have inherited not just one Agrippa in the form of Richard Rogers but I hope also to recruit a small additional panel of advisers drawn not just from the established names but also from some of the up and coming talent to work with me and Design for London to protect London’s unique urban village to encourage new architecture that will excite and delight visitors and Londoners alike to help a new Mayor in realising his ambition to beautify public spaces.

And not only to have more public conveniences, but in an age when bottled water has become taboo and when alcohol has been banned on public transport, to have a new crop of drinking fountains across the city and I don’t think I am betraying confidences if I say that if we can make sure there isn’t too much fluoride in the water we can have the support that vital architecture critic of the Prince of Wales.

So I hope you will join me in this next stage in our city’s journey so that we lengthen the lead of this city not just as the best place in the world to visit the best place in the world to make money but the best place in the world to live.