But who are they for?

Lottery-funded buildings are making grand statements across the country. But a new book by Jonathan Glancey poses serious questions about their purpose, says Jay Merrick

Prince Charles, launching the international Council of Tall Buildings conference in London on Tuesday, did a "carbuncle" by warning against skyscrapers that were too phallic. He compared his presence among tall-building advocates as being like a police raid on a brothel. And, quoting novelist Thomas Wolfe, he described amenity spaces as "a turd in every plaza". The Prince of Wales wants tall buildings to be carefully sited and beautifully, if not soulfully, designed. Quite so. But it is his unfortunate fascination with body parts that the headline-writers grab, and which encourages one-liner debate.

Prince Charles's latest decree provides an entrée to a difficult subject – the "selling" of architecture. In high-profile architecture, the future must be assured in advance. Buildings, even before completion, are trailed like government policies in the media: the on-message massage precedes the medium. It's about control, the tenderising of responses to create acceptance. But whose acceptance? Who, and what, is this kind of popular architecture for?

Well, architects for a start. Two weeks ago, I spent a morning with Jacques "Tate Modern" Herzog. A week ago, a day with Sir Michael Hopkins' charming representative and Daniel Libeskind. And their projects: the Laban Centre in Deptford, the newly extended Manchester City Galleries, and the Imperial War Museum North.

This is Culture with a big C. All these great designers delivering their architecture so that art and history of a certain kind can be set in stone, steel, glass and concrete. These projects are designed to draw attention to selected cities and locales – touchstones for change that will give them that "world class" feel. The Government cannot afford these buildings, but they can play Big Daddy via the Lottery; dish out money spent by countless strangers who hope to get something for next to nothing. The Lottery is a micro-tax paid by millions every week. But what they get for their money is usually not theirs to choose. The architecture that results may be irrelevant to their lives. The production-line of buildings and "experiences" generated by the Lottery is controlled by arbiters of taste and culture whose concerns about ordinary life in specific places are mostly less than profound.

Does "headline" architecture have much to do with the mass of the people? What is it for – and what proof is there that it does anything more than generate tourism and money? There are, of course, some Lottery-funded projects to which these questions do not apply. Tate Modern provides a fraught example of the Lottery effect. It has trendied that part of London's south bank; property prices are ratcheting up. It creates more jobs, to be sure. But where, in five years' time, will those who fill them have to travel in from? Is architecture about muck or brass?

Jonathan Glancey, the architecture critic, thinks it is essentially a three-card trick involving money, mass-therapy and government control. And he has said so in an extraordinary act of literary innocence, London – Bread and Circuses. I do not say "innocence" with stiletto intent; quite the reverse. He has written a naked, socialist critique of architecture hobbled by what he sees as political apathy. It is a cri de coeur that has already been sharply, and predictably, dissed in certain quarters.

I thought of this slim volume, and the ideas in it, while visiting the Lottery-funded projects in Deptford and Manchester. Glancey's position might be encapsulated in his claim that the Government is using such major, Lottery-funded architectural interventions to distract peoples' attention from the reality of ordinary metropolitan lives "supported" by air-kissing Labour apparatchiks uninterested in changing the status quo. Roads are sclerotic, hospitals have become increasingly grungy, and the overall transport strategy – well, there isn't one. Lottery-funded architecture, he insists, is the equivalent of the placatory bread and circuses fed to the Roman masses during their city's classical decline.

These are serious charges which, at first, threaten to drag architecture into faintly comical Citizen Smith territory. But Glancey's sentiments – vulnerable, elegiac, headlong – are not, after all, the cod-revolutionary stuff of the Tooting Popular Front because he has, quixotically, made no effort to cover his back with clever get-outs. His mixture of diatribe and wistful recollection invokes a New Jerusalem that could only be reached by turning the clock back to the agitprop Seventies.

Glancey's catalogue of the meaningful has a very specific tenor: "the city of my early childhood"; those "peerless Cockney artists" Turner, Blake, Hogarth; "Mr Monty chopping eels for Tubby Isaacs in Lovat Lane"; "cosy" terraces around Highbury, "decent" schools. He misses "the Clerkenwell of glassware, watchmakers and radical politics, the London of pristine and uniform-red double-deckers, of Red Bus Rovers that allowed me to ride across and right round Greater London, proud to be a Londoner – civis Londinius sum – living in a city that had yet to flog off its family silver to the highest bidder. A London pre-privatisation, pre-deregulation, pre-Thatcher, pre-PFI, pre-PPP and pre-every other demeaning, degrading, insulting, petty, penny-pinching policy devised by cynical politicians to keep London down."

Londoners "are being bought off by New Labour with dashing architecture, modish cafés and sumptuous museums. Attractive additions to the city though these may be, they start to look like a shoddy exercise in the promotion of passivity ... we'll be happily distracted by the chance to shop, eat and view art in a few gorgeous buildings."

The Laban Centre and Imperial War Museum North are interesting buildings in the making. But will they distract south Londoners and the inhabitants of Manchester's estates from the grittier imperatives of their lives? I think not. We choose our distractions knowingly, and they do not erase our underlying concerns. Cruising Tate Modern does not stop us being furious about shambolic trains. Lottery-funded architecture may be a transient distraction, but it can also be a sharp reminder of the disparities and cynicism that so concern Glancey.

His small book is peculiarly significant because it is totally unself-conscious, a final, despairing shout from a humanist for whom architecture is too often vacuous bunkum. What he wants – huge spending on architecture that changes lives – is impossible. But by wanting it so passionately he may focus some minds on what may, just, be possible, and not just in London. The city's pre-war director of Transport, Frank Pick, to whom the book is dedicated, knew that good architecture and effective infrastructure went hand-in-hand, and that it required strategy, massive investment – and nerve.

In Manchester, the new Lottery-funded projects will suck in more tourists and business conventions, taking earnings from this slice of the city's activities to well over £500m. At Deptford Creekside – in Glancey's "mongrel London" – the trickle-down will be harder to judge.

Jonathan Glancey's 'London – Bread and Circuses' is published by Verso, £12