Jonathan Meades: Architecture is bunk

London: city of wasted opportunity. London: city of lost nerve. London: city of tectonic timidity. London – you get the picture.

A week ago Channel 4 broadcast the award of the Riba Stirling Prize to Magna in Rotherham. Before the nicely brusque announcement of the winner we were privileged to witness the judges – some of whom I know, one of whom I'd count as a friend – voraciously freebying like victims of hospitality in their chosen locations. The evident potential for base comedy was regrettably unrealised. If only Mick Jagger could have played Janet Street-Porter, if only Timothy Spall had been available to grow a beard and give us his definitive Paul Finch ...

My preoccupation with notional casting was such that I hardly remarked the weakness of the metropolitan submissions. The next day that weakness was forcibly brought home by the arrival of Kenneth Powell's new london architecture. The title, in some prissy exhibition of ee cummings' typographical tiresomeness, is written thus, in minuscules. This is a handsomely produced, deftly written, admirably photographed survey of buildings made over the past half decade and buildings proposed during that period. It confirms a conviction that I ruefully hold – that in achieving what the architect Peter Alderton once called "a better standard of ordinariness" London all but quashes the extraordinary, the eccentric, the prodigious.

It used to be a shibboleth of the architectural profession that "architecture reflects society". That dictum was an undisputable given at the Architectural Press when I worked there more than 20 years ago. I have long believed that this was bunk: every trade and endeavour similarly flatters itself. Dentistry reflects society, the state of actuarial prowess is a thermometer of the cultural climate and so on. Powell's book has, however, prompted me at least partially to revise my opinion. Society? Well not really ... But his book might equally have been called new labour architecture. Page after page of this exhaustive inventory tells the same technophiliac tale of an almost invariable idiom: user-friendly modernism, "accessible modernism", cosmetic modernism, synthetic modernism ...

The great panjandrum of the Architectural Press, Colin Boyne, with whom I have lately laid the foundations of a rapprochement, used to insist, too, that modernism was not a mere "style" but something akin to a moral imperative, an extra-aesthetic neccessity. Along with most of my generation, I was thrilled by David Watkin's Morality and Architecture (just reissued as Morality and Architecture Revisited), an elegant if rather graceless polemic which sought to demonstrate the fatuity of the position adopted by Boyne, Pevsner and that generation.

"Look at Oliver Hill," I said. "One day in the Thirties he would be doing oolitic vernacular (in the Cotswolds), the next day neo-Regency (in Chelsea), the next day modernism (in the Surrey hills, at Canford Cliffs). Surely that proves that modernism is just a style that can be dipped into – sampled?" Boyne's neatly Jesuitical response was that Hill's modernism was not, could not have been, real modernism because Hill was evidently not committed. He was a promiscuous agnostic. I, shamefully, thought that that again was bunk.

I am perturbed by the way things are going. We haven't really got beyond post-modernism: there was po-mo classicism, there was po-mo Art Deco, there was po-mo Tudor. Now, everywhere in London, there is post-modernist modernism. Everywhere you go there are new buildings which might have been made in the Fifties.

New Labour architecture looks backwards. All one can hope for is the exceptions: Piers Gough, the gothic half of Richard Rogers, and of course Will Alsop. Anyone who has seen and savoured Alsop's Grand Bleu in Marseille will suss what I'm on about. Here is a great artist who is denied opportunities in his own country – Peckham Library and the Jubilee line station at the Dome hardly count. The most inspired schemes Kenneth Powell shows are those which I know in my heart of hearts will never get built.