Architects vision of London takes inspiration from 19th-century Paris

Father and son architect team Quinlan and Francis Terry at their studio in Dedham. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian

In a warren of rooms inside a 400-year-old townhouse on the Essex-Suffolk border, a counter-revolution against the most dramatic rebuilding of the London skyline in decades is gathering strength.

Eschewing computer power for sharp pencils and tracing paper, father and son architect team Quinlan and Francis Terry are drafting classically inspired designs for some of the capitals most prominent sites in a fightback against plans for hundreds of new skyscrapers.

Working from offices wallpapered with copies of the Times from 1957 in the picturesque historic town of Dedham, they are the antithesis of their modernist rivals in central London studios. But their latest scheme confirms them as a spearhead of a growing movement for an alternative urbanism.

As part of a bid for one of the most sought-after and prominent super-prime sites in the capital, they have drafted a gigantic apartment groundscraper on the site of the armys Hyde Park barracks in the style of the Paris city blocks planned by Georges Eugne Haussmann in the 19th century. It could be the sign of things to come. David Cameron last month appointed Quinlan Terry to a government panel advising on new housing design standards and awarded him a CBE.

With its stone facade and mansard roof, the traditional proposal for the site, which the Ministry of Defence is considering selling off, is the latest gambit in a broadening campaign against schemes for clusters of towers on prime land, maximising profits at the expense, critics argue, of human-scale streets and public spaces.

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The counter-movements key players include Prince Charles, who earlier this year made a speech backing a new wave of traditional architecture to help solve Londons housing problems; Paul Murrain, an urbanist and until recently an architecture adviser to Charles; and Nicholas Boys Smith a former adviser to the chancellor, George Osborne who has set up a lobby group against the direction development is taking under the banner Create Streets.

About 250 towers of more than 20 storeys are being planned in London according to research by the New London Architecture centre, sparking unfavourable comparisons with the unchecked development of Dubai and Shanghai.

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Architects vision of London takes inspiration from 19th-century Paris