Modern British buildings are not as good as they should be and fall far short of the standards set by the Georgians, one of the country’s leading architects said yesterday.

Richard Rogers was speaking after he was revealed as the recipient of this year’s Pritzker Prize, regarded as architecture’s equivalent of a Nobel prize.

From the moment that he gained international recognition with his radical design for the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the flamboyant Lord Rogers of Riverside has been at the vanguard of contemporary British design and urban planning. But he said yesterday that, despite the great strides made towards bolder architecture in Britain during his 40-year career, British cities were still not as enjoyable to live in as they had been 200 years ago.

Rogers, 73, with no apparent thought for the slum dwellers of that time, continued: “The battle is to get cities as a whole up to the standards that Georgian cities used to be at with their tree-lined avenues, wonderful squares and great windows overlooking garden areas. It’s the coherent sense of place that you get with Holland Park and Belgravia, or the Victorian Notting Hill. These are wonderfully planned.”

He cited Barcelona and Copenhagen as cities that had achieved a contemporary “unity of purpose” comparable to the clean lines, dynamic streets and restful spaces of the wealthier parts of Georgian London.

Modern London, he said, had only stretches that were “surprisingly successful”, such as the South Bank, from Westminster Bridge to the Docks, past Tate Modern and the Globe Theatre.

“We still haven’t achieved a high enough quality in terms of both buildings and public spaces in contemporary architecture. There’s a long way to go. If you take a trip to the Thames Gateway, it’s pretty disappointing to see what’s been built on one of the most beautiful rivers of the world. It’s basic stuff — if you take a boat down it you see that half the buildings look away from the river.”

“Britain has an exceptional number of good architects but Spain has a higher standard of architecture. Why?

“It’s the selection of architects and planners which can be improved on. Often the people who make the selection — and it is often city councils — don’t have high enough aspirations.”

As the 2007 Pritzker Laureate, Rogers will receive a grant for $100,000 (£51,000) and a bronze medallion at a ceremony to be held in London on June 4.

Two of Rogers’s early business partners have beaten him to the prize: Norman Foster, with whom he started his first practice, won in 1999; and Renzo Piano, with whom he built the Pompidou Centre, won the year before that. He joins Foster, Zaha Hadid and the late James Stirling as the only British winners.

The citation from the jury described Rogers as “a humanist, who reminds us that architecture is the most social of arts”, through his belief in “the potential of the city to be a catalyst for social change”.

Examples of Rogers’s projects picked out by the jury include the Pompidou Centre (1971-1977), with its distinctive multicoloured ducts and escalators on its exterior, Lloyd’s of London in the City of London (1978-1986) and the recently completed Terminal 4 at Barajas airport in Madrid (1997-2005), which won the 2006 Stirling Prize.

Winning talent

— Lord Rogers has acted as an adviser to the Mayor of London

— He is in favour of higher-density city homes

— He is married to Ruth Rogers, whose influential restaurant The River Café started life as the staff canteen for his architectural practice in Hammersmith

— They live in Chelsea, in a pair of converted Georgian terrace houses that have been knocked through

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