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The mayor's deal has smothered London's public spaces with what may be the largest piece of corporate branding in existence

London's long-awaited cycle-hire scheme is launched this week. While there's no doubt it's a valuable addition to the capital's public transport options, it strikes yet another blow to the idea of London as a dignified city. First of all, there's the name. Paris has the Velib, Montreal has the Bixi; what does London get? Barclays Cycle Hire. Clearly the good people at Barclays marketing thought long and hard about that one.

Maybe it's not worth getting too wound up about the name – selling the rights to popular institutions is unlikely to make anyone who watches, say, the Barclays Premier League or the Npower Championship even blink. What is new, however, is the prospect of more than a hundred kilometres of the capital's road surface being branded with corporate livery. The city's new dedicated cycle lanes – two of which recently opened, with another ten to come before the Olympics – are called "Barclays Cycle Superhighways" and painted Barclays blue.

London can now claim the dubious honour of hosting what is surely the largest piece of corporate branding in existence. It's not just the scale, the mind-blowing square footage, that is shocking about this – it's the principle. We're not talking about some supersized billboard here: we're talking about the mayor selling off the very road beneath our wheels – one of the few parts of a city that counts indisputably as public space. Whether they realise it or not, whether or not they even care, from now on thousands of cyclists are doomed to commute on a giant Barclays ad.

The sponsorship deal, worth £25m, has been presented as a coup for Boris Johnson. It has enabled him to recover some of the £140m Transport for London spent on the cycle-hire scheme and has even been presented as "payback" for the mayor's support of the banks during the credit crunch. Surely, however, £25m is a small price to pay for such an invasive piece of branding? If a city of the global stature of London can't afford to provide rental bikes without turning its urban fabric into a massive endorsement, we're in trouble.

There is something, too, in the gibes suggesting this is not just Barclays blue but Tory blue. Neither New Labour nor former mayor Ken Livingstone did anything to prevent the growing privatisation of the city, but it is hard to imagine Livingstone selling off a chunk of the public realm in such brazen fashion. Johnson seemingly lacks any sensitivity to the ethical or aesthetic side-effects of his deal-making – this is, after all, the man who condemned the Stratford Olympics site to a hideous 115m-high sculpture – precisely the kind of vainglorious ego trip the Olympics can do without – based on a 45-second chat with Britain's richest man in the cloakroom at Davos. We must be careful not to assume a loss of innocence; private ownership and interests have held sway in this city for centuries, and often cooperation between private and public bodies is the best way to meet the city's needs. However, the public realm that the Victorians handed over to municipal authorities to manage in the public good – including streets and pavements, squares, and infrastructure such as transport and sewage networks – has been under steady assault since the privatisation of the Thatcher years.

A decade ago, Naomi Klein argued in her book No Logo that we had reached a point where it seemed nothing could happen anymore without a corporate sponsor. The inevitable upshot of their growing social power was that brands wanted an expanded visual presence. T-shirt logos and media advertisements were no longer enough: branding had to be a fully immersive experience. As the superhighways prove, there is no amount of space a brand will not happily fill, with public bodies all too willing to hand it over. TfL is becoming ever more imaginative about the bits of Tube stations it will sell off to advertisers – including, now, the space between escalators and the gates of the exit barriers. Every year the Regent Street Christmas lights, once a public gesture organised by the Regent Street Association, turn a major thoroughfare into a 3D advert for some fashion label or blockbuster movie.

Increasingly entire pieces of London have become brands in their own right, a process that began in the 1980s with the privately owned Canary Wharf development. Since then, so-called "business improvement districts" have been popping up all over the capital under the banner of regeneration: Broadgate in the City, Paddington Basin, Kings Cross Central, the new Spitalfields Market, the More London development near Tower Bridge. It's a national phenomenon, too, exemplified by "malls without walls" such as Liverpool ONE or Brindleyplace in Birmingham. They might look like other parts of the city, but they are very different. Stroll through Broadgate and you'll notice the logo of developer British Land studding the pavements. These are privately owned developments, policed by private security guards who can throw you out for the slightest misdemeanour or – if you happen to be sleeping rough, say – simply for disrupting the projection of affluence. In the case of More London – a series of sterile glass blocks set amid some rather uptight landscaping on the South Bank – the very name is a deliberate deception. The developers are trying to claim this is just an ordinary piece of the city. Don't believe it.

Anyone who wants to find out more about the insidious privatisation of British cities should read Anna Minton's latest book, Ground Control. The point is that we are in danger or running out of unbranded space. Though it may seem innocuous, the branding of cycle lanes sets an all-too-exploitable precedent. As citizens we have a communal birthright, which includes the public realm. Our representatives are supposed to protect that – not sell it off to corporations who are neither responsible nor accountable for the spaces of which they claim symbolic ownership. Politicians seem only too ready to turn our cities into horizontal billboards. If we're not vigilant, the urban landscape is going to become a brandscape.

• Irish owners refinance and want to list the project on Aim
• See our gallery of previous redevelopment plans

The troubled owners of Battersea power station have unveiled plans to float the building on the stock exchange in the latest in a string of attempts to redevelop the derelict London landmark.

Despite numerous plans for the 40-acre site, it has stood empty for more than a quarter of a century while the rest of the Thames waterfront around it has undergone huge change.

Now Irish property group Real Estate Opportunities (REO), which bought the Battersea site in 2006 for £400m, wants to spin it off and possibly float it on London's Alternative Investment Market (Aim). It is also looking for a partner to take a 50% stake in the project and provide the financial firepower.

REO has been hit hard by the Irish property slump. It reported an underlying loss before tax of nearly £1bn for the 14 months to 28 February, reflecting an £811m drop in the valuation of its property portfolio.

The firm has drawn up a shortlist of possible investors after being approached by a number of international real estate groups, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds from around the world, including the Middle East.

REO hopes to get permission to redevelop the site in September after submitting the largest ever planning application made in central London, in terms of financial value, last autumn. If it gets the go-ahead, the site's value is expected to soar from the current valuation of £388m.

"It's an opportunity to turn the power station into a cultural icon for London," said Robert Tincknell, who runs REO's parent firm, Treasury Holdings. "A year ago, people were saying 'it's not going to happen'. That's changed enormously over the last 12 months, with the planning permission having gone in and the support we have [from the London mayor, Boris Johnson, English Heritage and Wandsworth Council]." The Conservatives launched their election manifesto at the power station in April.

Treasury Holdings was forced to tear up its plans for the imposing building, one of London's most recognisable landmarks, and start again after Johnson decided that a proposed tower would ruin the view from Waterloo Bridge to the Palace of Westminster. The original plan, drawn up by the New York-based architect Rafael Viñoly, included a futuristic 300m glass funnel and atrium, rising from an enormous transparent dome.

Viñoly and Treasury Holdings came up with a new blueprint a year ago that is capped at a height of 60m, as stipulated by the mayor. It includes 3,700 homes, office space, shops, restaurants and leisure facilities, at a cost of £4.5bn. Treasury Holdings also hopes to co-fund an extension of London Underground's Northern Line to the site.

The high cost means the company needs a partner – "someone who can bring big financial strength to it to make sure it happens," said Tincknell. Building work could start at the end of 2011.

When the power station was decommissioned in 1983, its then owners, the Central Electricity Generating Board, wanted to tear down the building and replace it with housing, but it had been given a Grade II listing in 1980. For developers, the real prize is the land around it; most have little interest in its heritage status.

REO said today it had negotiated new lending terms for Battersea with Lloyds Banking Group and Nama – Ireland's "bad bank" – which means its existing bank facility will be extended and all outstanding breaches waived.

• 187-metre-high crossing for Wear wins approval
• Construction depends on securing funds after 6 May

The tallest bridge in England is set to join the country's long list of famous northern landmarks, slung from two slender columns across the river Wear.

Curved in a fingers-crossed design, unwittingly reflecting years of searching for the cash to build it, the crossing in Sunderland will tower above other lofty icons, including the Angel of the North.

Prosaically listed as the New Wear Crossing in the Sunderland Strategic Transport Corridor, it will stand 187 metres (613ft) – taller than Blackpool Tower, at 158 metres, and approaching four times the height of Nelson's 51-metre column.

Once building starts, a competition will help find the bridge a handy nickname.

The sensational design, given planning approval today by Sunderland council, dates back five years but was kept under wraps until 2008, to avoid disappointment if funding failed. A government promise of £98m for an off-the-peg bridge freed the council to ask residents if it could add £32m for something special. They looked at the mock-ups and gave a big yes vote.

"It will be a people's bridge," said Sunderland's Labour council leader, Paul Watson, who is hoping to preempt less dignified slang for the striking silhouette. Horny Bridge is one contender, reflecting the curving shape of the two towers, but a claim that the suspension wires would play the Geordie anthem Blaydon Races in high winds proved to be the Sunderland Echo's April fool.

Although designed to ease traffic and help regeneration of former shipyard and engineering sites, the bridge is a deliberate attempt to give Sunderland a lift. Watson said: "It will be a distinctive new symbol for the city, help raise our profile and the potential for greater prosperity."

Sunderland already has a beautiful riverscape where the Ghyll [aka Galley's Gill] meets the Wear, embellished by the Winter Gardens, National Glass Centre and university buildings. But it looks jealously across at the Tyne's bridges, as well as the Angel, Sage concert hall and Baltic gallery.

Stephen Spence, architect of the new bridge, who also designed the graceful double curve of the Infinity bridge in Stockton-on-Tees, said: "This is positive and bold. It's particularly pleasing to see the support from the community."

The last, nervy wait for the Wear bridge will be the post-election period, but all parties have suggested that they would not pull the financial plug. Labour is involved in a battle to defend Sunderland Central from a Tory challenge led by the party's group leader on the council.

The council has planned to start work on the bridge in 2012, with completion due in 2015, but the local funding is potentially vulnerable because of Tory hostility to regional development agencies.

The local development agency, One North East, has pledged £3.1m for the bridge; the loss of that could affect Sunderland's own contribution of £19.1m as well as a further £12.8m from the government's local transport plan for the north-east.

• This article was amended on 5 May 2010. The original said named Sunderland South Labour as the constituency where Labour is facing a Conservative challenge. This has been corrected. An alternative rendering of the Ghyll has also been added, in clarification.

A new motorway service station being designed in the Cotswolds will lead the way environmentally

Motorway services and green design are ­awkward bedfellows. It's not simply the petrol, the ­shopping and the fast food, but ­service stations take up a lot of space. And of course, they're dispiriting to look at.

But the challenge of building new services in the Cotswolds between junctions 11 and 12 of the M5 persuaded the developers to hold a competition. It was won by Glenn Howells, whose Savill Building in Windsor Park was shortlisted for the Stirling prize three years ago.

Designed to "knit" into the landscape so that even the petrol station cannot be seen from the road, it will emit a fifth of the carbon dioxide of normal motor­way services thanks to a kitchen garden, the creation of habitats for wildlife, and the use of ­locally sourced Douglas fir as the ­building material.

The consortium, whose planning application is to be considered by Stroud district council, includes Westmorland, the ­family-run firm behind the much-admired Tebay services in Cumbria, which won Egon Ronay's British Academy of Gastronomes' Grand Prix award last year.

The trouble is, having arrived you might never want to leave. The architect describes it as "a rural oasis", but it's not just the peace and quiet that is so appealing. It's the homemade food, the fresh veg and organic meat that will be sold in the farm shop, and the locally produced art and crafts replacing Marks & Spencer, WH Smith and other brands that will be banned, while profits will be ploughed back into the local community.

Green and foodie credentials aside, it's the design that will put it on the architectural map. The undulating shapes echo the landscape, while the ­timber-clad ­interior looks like the ­business- class lounge of a ­Scandinavian airport, with curvy chairs, low coffee tables and subtle lighting. Bring on the organic apple juice, the carrot cake and the hand-thrown pottery.

Amanda Baillieu is the editor of Building Design.

People cheered from bridges at the opening of Britain's first long-distance motorway, built to beat the jams

We had seen other people's (those who had been to Italy had seethed with envy when they first saw an autostrada) and now at last we had one of our own. This was not in fact quite the first motorway section in Britain – what was known as the Preston bypass was already working by then. But here, commemorated yesterday in a 50th birthday ceremony at Watford Gap services, was the first inauguration of any great consequence: the initial section of the M1, 62 miles from junction 5 near Watford to junction 18 near Crick. It was opened on 2 November 1959 by the minster of transport, Ernest Marples, soon to be immortalised on this territory when somebody decorated one of his fine new bridges with the legend:  Marples Must Go.

It was fast, it was straight, and as more such roads were certain to follow it held out the promise of one day being able to drive from London to Manchester without sitting for hours in jams somewhere in Staffordshire. The first traffic was cheered by people hanging over the bridges to watch more fortunate people in cars speeding beneath them. It was part of the package that enabled Harold Macmillan to win an election with the claim that the British had never had it so good.

The construction had been an epic, though it took only eighteen months. Men who had never worked on building a road before were pressed into service. My friend Dave, a would-be actor, proudly proclaimed as we sped down the M1 a year or so later: "I built this road," although he had to admit that others had helped him. Many of these were recruited  from Ireland. In his book On Roads, a Hidden History, Joe Moran says that so many came that two Catholic priests were shipped over to hear confessions and say mass in the admin huts.

Of course there were disbelievers. Some thought this thirst for moving around at speed was part of the same disease that the 19th century poet Matthew Arnold identified when he asked what profit it was to move at high speed from Islington to Camberwell, when one simply left a dull illiberal life in the one for a dull illiberal life in the other. Others feared that the road would develop technical problems, as it very soon did, though not quite on the scale some had forecast. Others deplored its straightness. Only the gentlest of curves were permitted, which made for monotony, which might make for sleep, which was likely to make for accidents. That was a lesson learned and honoured in the making of later motorways. Still, it was only the most austere and self-denying of drivers who did not fancy a spin on this new invention. The Queen tried it out with the Duke of Edinburgh driving her in a Lagonda.

There were rituals here which did not exist with conventional roads. They had roadhouses of course, but not the dependable sequence of motorway service stations mustered along the M1, bringing a new degree of national recognition to places such as Newport Pagnell. The Watford Gap entered the language: until then, southerners used to talk of the alien territory "north of Watford"; now terra incognita began at the Watford Gap. As ever, as the novelty ebbed, so did the gratitude. People began to moan over the "bloody M1". Yet anyone tempted to undervalue the motorways should try driving tomorrow, say from London to Swindon, by the route that one had to take before the M4,  juddering through the centre of Reading. We were right to celebrate, and my friend Dave was right to feel pride: 2 November 1959 was a day of liberation.