For a couple of recent summers, gaggles of young Chinese tourists would regularly find themselves lost in an industrial estate on the edge of the A11 dual carriageway in east London, smartphones in hand, in search of the perfect selfie. They were here to find a wall.Not just any old wall, but one that had been photographed and shared online thousands of times.

“It was quite a surreal time,” says Maria Lisogorskaya of architecture collective Assemble, which had erected a big wooden shed in the yard of its Stratford studio in 2014, and clad it with a jolly facade of pastel-coloured cement tiles. Little did they know it would become an Instagram sensation, listed on a Chinese blog as the most Instagrammable wall in London...