Academic and pundit Tony Travers heaps praise on a pier that lends grace to the Naples of the north, and pours scorn on a pathologically misanthropic medical college

黑洞社区s where you live matter enormously. If something is attractive, every time you see it, it lifts your heart. If it鈥檚 ugly, the opposite is true. Both my wonder and my blunder are neighbours of mine: in Llandudno where I grew up and in central London, where I live today.

For my wonder, I choose Llandudno Pier, the longest in Wales. This is partly a matter of nostalgia and due to memories of being walked on it as a child, but I also select it because of its architectural impact. The structure has the effect of lengthening the curved sweep of the bay in Llandudno, a town that Queen Carmen Sylva of Romania, who鈥檇 spend some time there in 1890, called the Naples of the north.

Apart from that, it has excellent ironwork and the pier head pavilions have more than a touch of the Orient about them. It has always survived as a going concern; now it sustains itself through bouncy castles and slot machines. This proves how right the Victorians were when they employed beautiful engineering and prowess in design in creating places of pleasure.

My blunder is the back of the Royal College of Physicians. You can see why the building won prizes for its front. It鈥檚 constructed in a mellow concrete that is as appealing as that kind of brutalism gets. But in Albany Street, onto which it backs, it鈥檚 ugly in several different dimensions at once. It ignores the buildings on either side of it and is built in a mix of deliberately 鈥渟od you鈥� materials; it maintains the height of none of the buildings or window levels on the street and it is quite obviously a back in a street full of frontages.

It鈥檚 wilfully, memorably and balefully undesirable and thus it鈥檚 a bad neighbour.

Llandudno Pier

Wonder

Llandudno Pier is 2,295ft long. It was designed by Charles Henry Driver and James Brunlees and constructed for the Llandudno Pier Company by Walter Macfarlane of Glasgow using iron castings from the Glasgow Elmbank foundry. It was opened in 1877 after the previous structure was damaged in the Royal Charter Storm in 1859.

The Royal College of Physicians

Blunder

The Royal College of Physicians on the east side of Regent鈥檚 Park, was designed by Sir Denys Lasdun in 1964. It is one of the few post-war buildings that is grade I-listed. The use of mosaic-clad concrete influenced many later public buildings.

Tony Travers is director of LSE London at the London School of Economics