Walking around the City of London today I couldn’t help comparing the London buildings with what I was seeing in Dubai. Here the old and new sit side by side. There’s not much ‘old’ in Dubai. 30 St Mary Axe (commonly known as the Gherkin) is a commercial skyscraper and with 41 floors, 180 metres (591 ft) tall[3] it’s a dwarf next to Dubai skyscrapers. I didn’t realise that it stands on the sites of the former Baltic Exchange and Chamber of Shipping, which were extensively damaged in 1992 in the Baltic Exchange bombing by a device placed by the Provisional IRA in St Mary Axe.
