London is in danger of growing too tall in all the wrong places, the Prince of Wales said yesterday.

Addressing a conference of architects and planners at St James’s Palace, the nation’s leading campaigner against brutalist building condemned proposals to erect high-rise towers close to relatively low-rise historic buildings such as the Tower of London and St Paul’s Cathedral.

Extreme high-rise buildings were fine in their place, such as Canary Wharf in the London Docklands, where they could create a dramatic new skyline to rival Manhattan or La Défense in Paris. But they should be banned, he said, in historic parts of London and in cities such as Edinburgh and Bath whose historic Georgian centres rarely rose above a few storeys.

As he spoke, the Prince was being contradicted in his own backyard. Plans for a block of almshouses in his model village of Poundbury, Dorset, were approved by local councillors in the face of objections from Dorchester Town Council, not that it was too high, but because its design was so severe that it resembled a Dickensian workhouse.

The Prince is a vociferous opponent of severe architecture. He has described the reading room of the British Library at St Pancras in Central London as looking like the assembly hall of a secret police academy, and Birmingham’s central library as looking like a place where books were incinerated rather than stored.

Returning to his best-known architectural criticism, his description in 1984 of the proposed National Gallery extension – which was never built - as a “monstrous carbuncle”, the Prince of the present danger to the London skyline said: “Not just one carbuncle on the face of a much loved old friend, but a positive rash of them that will disfigure precious views and disinherit future generations of Londoners.”

Pressure to build up to 3.25 million new homes by 2016 would inevitably lead to more tower blocks being built, despite such buildings already being widely discredited, he said. Many could be built in historic parts of London, making the city ever more like any other and destroying the uniqueness that had helped generate its tourist revenue. He highlighted the case of Berlin, where there has been a frenzy of building in the past decade but where planning authorities have imposed strict restrictions on the height of new buildings. “This kind of approach can help to achieve a far more coherent sense of harmony than the alternative free-for-all that will leave London and our other cities with a pockmarked skyline,” the Prince said.

Tourists spent £7.5 billion in London in 2006 and St Paul’s and the Tower of London were Britain’s top paid attractions. Yet speculative towers were imposed in the environs of both, he said. “Canary Wharf already provides, like La Défense, a place for those statements of corporate aspiration to be made. Why can they not be concentrated there, rather than overshadowing Wren’s and Hawksmoor’s churches?”

Other architectural Aunt Sallies at which he has thrown a coconut include the National Theatre, which he described as a clever way of building a nuclear power station in Central London, and a redevelopment opposite the Mansion House in the City that he thought looked like a 1930s wireless.

His latest pronouncement drives him perilously close to becoming a Banana – an acronym of his own invention, circa 1999 – which stands for Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.

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