Opulent clock towers, grand halls, building facades covered in splendour and stone.
It can be done well, as along Regent Street, where vastly different interiors are cleverly inserted behind regular cream-cake facades.
It must be the only book festival in a Unesco world heritage site, and one can imagine the elegant restrained Robert Adam facades enjoying the colourful bohemian air that attends the city square in August.
But too often, it remains a token gesture, even a -wilful two fingers up to the conservation officer, facades left butchered and awkwardly marooned, as if to say: "You made us keep it, and just see how you like it now".
Miles of sandstone facades are now quietly rotting away, sometimes noisily so when bits of masonry fall off.
In an innovative move, an architect has been put in charge of each of the 13 main streets, charged with restoring the facades of more than 500 buildings.
With their ornate turrets, spires, gabled windows and forbidding facades, many of them certainly look haunted.
Celebrating its 300th anniversary, the city will glisten with fresh paint and new gold leaf (though the bright facades, like most ball dresses, conceal flimsy supports and hasty fixes).
When television began sapping cinema in the 1950s and a law in 1960 legalised commercial bingo, the buildings, with their often-grand Art Deco facades and plush interiors, were snapped up by gambling entrepreneurs.
Behind the redbrick factory facades of nearby Bradford Street, the yuppies are also taking over, quietly occupying new flats within.Many of these go-getters are former Londoners.
Now, rimmed by the mirrored facades of office towers, gleaming petrochemical works, marinas, highways, bustling airports, vast shopping malls and sprawling subdivisions of sumptuous villas, it is home to 20m people.
