Gingerbread City has appeared in South Kensington opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum.  With a masterplan designed by Tibbalds, leading architectural practices and schools acquired a plot on which to build and bring the City to life.  There don’t appear to be any over-onerous planning restrictions, the only real constraint being the structural capabilities of gingerbread, jellies, marshmallow, polo mints and the like, so that – just in a real city - there are a huge variety of building styles, some traditional and folksy, some classical, some modern and some trying to push the structural capabilities of gingerbread as high as possible with skyscrapers.  Old shipping containers are here too, with a crane lifting them up into create a pop-up installation, just like in Brixton or Shoreditch.  

Devised by the Museum of Architecture, which creates exhibitions and events to help the public to engage with architecture and to help architects to engage with the communities for which they are designing and also to become more entrepreneurial, the Gingerbread City looks like a great success, with the space full of young people and families who might not naturally have the opportunity to engage with architecture.

The pop-up installation also included Gingerbread-housebuilding workshops and a competition for visitors to nominate the most imaginary Gingerbread-architecture design, all to raise funds to enable the Museum of Architecture to fund its activities over the next year.