Andrew Ashdown
LONDON NOW:
An Oyssey Through the Nation's Capital
2 WESTMINSTER
Across from Masham Street (if you’ve just joined us don’t worry – teleport in as recommended) we face Church House which sits in on DEAN's YARD and was designed by Sir Herbert Baker. The headquarters of the Church of England is now yet another conference centre, when Synod is not in session (3 or 4 days a year). Corporate packages from £400 to £55,000. Choose between the Robert Runcie or William Temple Rooms; coming your way, the Rowan Williams Break-Up of Traditional Marriage Zone. From the institutions that preached the life of poverty and St. Francis, a Canapé reception menu: Chinese tiger prawn with black and white sesame seeds and Szechuan dip; Spiced bean terrine, guacamole and round tomato served in a mini baked scone; Cumberland cocktail sausage with a wholegrain (!) mustard mayonnaise; Mini harissa lamb burgers in a miniature bap with mint yoghurt sauce; Spiced sweet potato and chard samosa served with a fresh raita; Tartlets filled with a pastry cream topped with fresh seasonal fruit; Homemade (what does that mean?) .... chocolate brownies dusted with cinnamon sugar. Won’t go on. Mini banoffee pie.
As I say, we’re in Dean’s Yard - or ‘Green’ (no article) as it's known to Westminster Schoolboys - once monastic property with this part the farm. Among the quads, find the impressively correct and restrained Little Dean’s Yard Dormitory or ‘College’ – large round-headed windows, piano nobile alternating segmental and triangular pediments and attic of square openings. It’s early Burlington (without Kent) in golden limestone, the affinities to Wren’s Trinity College Library inescapable.
The Sanctuary also backs on the Yard and, to Burlington’s restraint, here is showy, castellated stone, with 'Tudor’ turreted gatehouse and balcony-under-arch-under-gothic gable. It all shouts ‘churchy’: capped (or parapeted) stepped gables - North German or Dutch influence, perhaps - deeply recessed dormers (very triangular), numerous large mullioned and transomed windows. It also says ‘Waterhouse’, and could be Burgess or Blore, but is in fact bread and butter Gilbert Scott, 1854. Now, office accommodation for lease to the highest bidder. The Faculty Office is where Special Marriage Licenses come from and where I got my own medieval scroll with the Seal of Robert Cantuar ....
Had we come along the river front instead we might have saved time but as it is we’ll have to nip across to see:
VICTORIA TOWER GARDENS
where the likes of Nick Robinson, Gary Gibbon et al, for some unknown reason, choose to interview MPs (as well as in New Palace Yard), perhaps walking home to their expense-paid pads. We’re here for a view of the River, of course (of which much more anon .... and anon) as well as a couple of sculptures: Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, one of twelve such monuments (French government rules) and, more architectural, the Buxton Memorial Fountain by Samuel Teulon, 1865, rejoicing slavery’s emancipation; compare the contemporary Molyneux Mausoleum, Kensal Green Cemetery (→ 30.West), Scott’s Albert Memorial (→ 27. South Kensington) and other such efforts ... Fibreglass figures.
Well, it’s no good pretending any longer, no good living in denial. We have been avoiding the site that fills the sky ....
Now, had we continued down that American artery of Victoria Street we would, having the left the motley office automatons, feral hawkers and trifling tourists (remember those? → 1.Victoria), have found ourselves ignominiously at the excluding brown glass of the former DTI (Department of Trade & Industry] now Department for Business, Innovation & Skills, with its conference delegates and bureaucrats silently interred, and emerged with some relief to find a rather clichéd prospect – instead of which of course we’re staring at 330 feet of Victorian Gothic tower abutting a piece of early C16th whimsy.
So then, let’s jump over to the proper view (our ability to fly with the Red Queen coming in very useful at this point). There. We’re on that bit of pavement poking like a pier into the swirl of traffic on Storey’s Gate. Snap away and you have your free postcard.
This confused space, in fact an eliding sequence of squares is, it has to be said, de rigueur for the metropolis. And what a diverse assortment of buildings! On one side, another conference centre, more convincing than most, brashly so. Between us and it, a bulking, flat-domed eminence, beside which yet more offices; further on, beside said Conf Centre, a small yet tartly pompous affair throwing filigrees of pale grey stone about and, finally, beyond, beyond the noise of traffic, confusion of crossings, kerbs, lighting, signage, struggling, half-hearted verdure and haphazard statuary, rise the grand iconic forms: Royal Peculiar, Parish Church and Clock Tower, plus the incongruously over-sized roof, fenced-in post- 9/11 by a ring of steel.
One need hardly elaborate further but, rather, let us begin, as if we were indeed coming down from Victoria Street and, having so enjoyed the postcard, with only the briefest pause for the aforementioned Queen Elizabeth Conference Centre (only to recognise its idiomatic status), let us deal immediately with the domed Methodist Central Hall, a puzzling affair of the piled-up Ziggurat, wedding cake variety, a profligacy of volume intended to impress, if not entirely overwhelm. Bulk is achieved by sleight of hand: not stone but steel and ferro-concrete. Opened in 1912 on the site of the Royal Aquarium, the architects, Lanchester and Rickards, simply met the client’s brief: to be as unchurchlike as possible, a foil to the venue opposite. As for the size, that is explained by the range of functions within. Within, indeed, all makes sense: a phenomenal space that seats in excess of two thousand worshippers (delegates, onlookers, fans, punters, patrons, supporters, hecklers) with all the requisite appointments. The location for many a famous oration – Churchill, for example, and his nemesis, the ‘little fakir’.
At our backs, on this corner of Victoria and Tothill, the heightened lead roof of Nos.2-8, Barclays Bank, a seventies nod of acquiescence to Parliament in concrete fins (Pevsner) though one also sees Spence’s former Home Office (we saw earlier→ 1.Victoria) and, more tellingly, Richmond Terrace (coming up → 3.Whitehall) by Whitfield, who was in fact consultant here. The architect was N.D.N. Fairbairne.
Now to the pompous grey, which is the former Middlesex Guildhall, now Supreme Court, designed by James Gibson with Skipwith and Gordon and contemporary with much else here, including the Treasury. The questionable use of Portland stone at least chimes with St. Margaret’s, as does the carefully calibrated height. Described as ‘Gothic with Flemish–Burgundian references’, the handling of ornament and space owes something to Henry Wilson and Giles Scott (Liverpool Cathedral) but goes further, the plunging depths of the segmental-arched portal continued beyond the sculpted tympanum among blocky, cut-off turrets, the tower with an eliding, slicing aedicule, pinnacles and fiendishly complex frieze. Yet even that that pales beside the roofline where filigree framed dormers project from an immense parapet to finicky, sculptured pediments. Carvings, parapets and dormers everywhere (sculptor Henry Fehr) serenade Pugin’s work across the square.
In PARLIAMENT SQUARE , Prime Ministers vie with relics of Empire: Lloyd George, Palmerston, Peel, Disraeli, the Earl of Derby, Canning, Smuts, Lincoln, Mandela .. the ever-present Churchill.
Well, then, we're here. The Abbey. WESTMINSTER ABBEY. Eschew for now the curios and bric-a-brac, the mugs and tea-towels. Look up! So used are we to this view that we do not pause to consider the singularity and perversity of the design. Think for a moment, if you will, of towers (any pair you like) on cathedrals up and down the country. Not like these! It’s our introduction to that most radical, some might say perverse, possessed even, of the capital’s architects, Nicholas Hawksmoor. The lower half of the facade, note, is more or less faithful to medieval precedent. Almost. But look at the ramrod-straight clasping buttresses, the lack of set-back or diminution and then be prepared for what follows higher up. An entablature! A classical device! And as if somehow freed by this line, everything above changes, with a free play of rectangular, panelled forms, horizontal divisions unrelated to structural logic; over the clocks (real and dummy) classical pediments in place of gothic arches. All this in spite of Wren’s request to his former pupil to stay ‘on message’. The towers (according to one who knows) are insubstantial, should have been larger.
Well, yes, perhaps.
A flaw. A wobble. “That tee-jay-ee, that fatal tee-jay-ee!” The Laureate might have confided.
Well, then ‘enter the sepulchral door’, pay the fee (!) and ....
Get this! The height! The giddying height, immensity of space. This place does have something, after all - after all the rhetoric. Process down the nave. After the Cathedral, 'Our Cathedral' (→ 1.Victoria) , it’s rather plain, spartan. Chaste, even. A grey catacomb suited to the severity of certain well-known occasions (and their attendant Classic FM music). In the unrelieved chill, sputters the feeble glitter of the pulpitum: all that glitters, or glisters ... Beyond it, a set of stalls for glittering occasions: Edward Blore, the gilded pipes too, and so up to G.G. Scott’s altar and reredos. And still greater glories beyond: bronze effigies and turreted chantries (one a veritable cathedral in itself), brazen screens, paintings - the Confessor’s Shrine itself. Materials dazzle and compete with forms, though worn and chafed .... Cosmati floors, shellac coadstone to augment the greenish limestone, cold as Brighton beach.
Strangest of all the ‘great churches’. Yes, we have to use the term for, though once a cathedral, briefly (one bishop) it is now, of course, merely ‘Peculiar’. A problem of semantics, Watson. By every conceivable criterion, surely, this is a cathedral, lacking only the cathedra or bishop’s chair; it has of course, it’s own venerable wooden ‘chair’ but if we take the fundamentals of what makes a cathedral, besides the rather quotidian matter of furniture, then what have we got? Well, quite a lot, actually: a shrine (essential and there’s plenty here), a setting for mass (ditto), space for large gatherings (yup), arrays of glass, sculpture (John Massingham, Nicholas Stone), wood (said furnishings); and all those monuments and tombs. Aisles for processing, cloisters for interceding monks, a chapter house, Dean’s quarters, choir school .... all there, a full complement, a cathedral-scaled edifice brimming with all requisite features and accoutrements, height and space enough to ‘send’ one (this Pevsnerism is too apposite not to use and will be so unremittingly with, one hopes, the echo of his name always in the reader’s mind) - surely the defining characteristics of a ‘cathedral’ in any meaningful sense of the word?
The setting, of course, for state occasions, vying with St. Paul’s but also imbued so deeply with patina of the nation’s history, and that of the metropolis, as to be virtually synonymous therewith. A statement of the obvious, perhaps, but consider just one event, by way of illustration: the most epochal or, at any rate, beguiling moment in the musical history of these islands. No, not Diana’s funeral; not EJ the DJ’s stubby fingers tinkling ivories. Not the festive anthems of royal wedding and Coronation (as Prof. Starkey would protest). No. Think ‘Handel’ – none other, England’s adopted composer, and ‘Messiah’, and then add this; attendance of a performance thereof by another popular visitor, one Joseph Haydn. Which event was to have immediate and significant consequence for both Haydn and Mozart – even Beethoven. Proms seasons since they began.
Litigiously speaking, this not the seat of a ‘diocesan’ and his (or her) attendant administrative machinery, yet the several, special, ‘Peculiar’ roles of Westminster Abbey must exceed the ‘cathedral’ definition rather than fall short. Hence, the ranking (by ‘those who know’) which places it as one of the ‘Big Four’ alongside Canterbury, St. Paul’s and York (this, admittedly, has more to do with money than anything else). The term ‘cathedral’ – in its narrow sense, then, is not fit for purpose – beyond a useful shorthand. In the wider sense, in every meaningful dimension, this is one.
And talking of dimensions, it is indeed big: 531 feet long, 102 high, the latter figure exceeded only by late-comer Liverpool Anglican. In fact, it could have been higher; it’s well below its exemplars in France, Rheims in particular (125 ft) - due to the narrowness imposed by the restricted site.
And there’s the rub. Too high for its width, perhaps: a narrowing, corridor effect, bit like Ely, say, but here made worse by other factors (or perhaps the lack of certain advantages at Ely): the heavy ribbing and waxen stone. The side on, elevational proportions couldn’t be better: three storeys perfectly divided, the bottom row of arches (‘arcade’) occupying half the total height, the triforium and clerestory (upper ‘floors’) the remaining half, the triforium (middle) accounting for exactly a sixth and the clerestory (top), exactly a third (51 + 17 + 34 = 102 feet). That’s not just a game of numbers: it’s why it looks good - there’s the Golden Mean in there, somewhere. But one rarely look sideways.
The style is nothing if not consistent, the architect of the nave, Henry Yevele, having eschewed ‘London Perpendicular’ and stuck to the inheritance of Henry III when, after a century’s hiatus in royal patronage, he came to finish the building. At Canterbury, that similarly ancient, influential and revered foundation, Yevele broke with the past and created that most felicitous of Perpendicular naves.
So, why the French style? Henry III’s rebuilding was influenced by Capetian rival Louis IX, completing the eastern parts of Rheims (in 1241), rebuilding the trend-setting St. Denis (from 1231)and, finally, creating a place to house the relic Crown of Thorns, the Sainte-Chapel, the most persuasive influence of all. Henry was remote from a growing sense of nationalism at home, keen to cut a figure on the international stage (heard that before). And ‘Westminster’, a Benedictine house on Thorney Island, would complement ‘East Minster’ (St. Pauls). The first phase of rebuilding took 39 years, cost £46K, an immense sum but, in Henry’s view (other peoples’) money well spent, as Schama wonderfully gripes. ‘O man if you wish to know the cause. The king was Henry, friend of the present saint’, protests the inscription’[iii]. This then is the key to understanding Westminster and all that followed, including Yevele’s conformity.
Remote, alien – exactly. French to be precise. High columns rise to quadripartite vaults, Purbeck ‘marble’ shafts cluster and, against this, the shock of whiteness, due to the stone - Reigate – a ‘greenish grey calcareous limestone’[i]. Finally, that aforementioned heavy ribbing. The overall effect, French, yes, but heavier, clumsier – failing to provide the sense of ethereal lightness so axiomatic to the idéologie of the Île de France. The clerestory is ‘thin wall’ with no wall passage. Here, Binham Priory was a possible source but the narrow clerestory windows which Henry of Reyns instituted more likely came from St. Nicaise or Royaumont. But there’s no triforium, properly termed, just standard English galleries. The mason, Henry of Reyns, you see, had never actually worked at Rheims, despite visiting. Shades of Geoffrey Archer, Cambridge. Perhaps he hailed from Reins in Essex. The changes in master mason, from Reyns to John of Gloucester to Robert of Beverley meant increasing Anglicanisation: extra ribs added to the vault[iv], a proliferation never intended in the original scheme. The look is overburdened.
All said, an anomaly, not copied or followed elsewhere. Not the height, not the chevet, the double fliers, vaulting ribs .... Rose windows? Well, yes, those, and the window tracery in toto - the key legacy, in fact, henceforward de rigueur, along with, as has been truly said, a more general receptiveness and openness to French ideas, albeit only in part. Broadly speaking, the French plan was ignored (the only evidence of a direct influence being Hailes in Gloucestershire and Battle Abbey, Kent. As for the height – already limited by the constricted site at Westminster – this was simply not possible elsewhere, for another reason - most of the work underway was in extending existing fabric.
Henry wanted three for the price of one (a theme of this London odyssey - see Admiralty Arch, just up the road or The Dome, or .... ). The Abbey should combine the functions of (1) a coronation church, shrine and repository for royal regalia, in the manner of Rheims; (2) royal pantheon and necropolis, as per St. Denis, and (3) shrine to the Relic of the Most Precious Blood, as per the Sainte-Chapelle. Actually, that’s more than three things: six, seven ... never mind.
The Royal Pantheon – Sepulchre, Repository, Catacomb, Mausoleum, Necropolis, Feretory – fits the bill, more than, with its rigid crowd of cadavers, effigies, statues, sarcophagi, reliquaries, relics, catafalques and coffins (post-mortem. Formaldehyde). Each with their (as the Victorians loved) éloge, obsequies, panegyric, paean, praise, obituary, elegy, eulogy, tribute, peroration, extolment, encomium or eclogue:
St. Denis – Westminster Abbey – Frogmore
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
Burning
The Ambulatory is stuffed. The venerable include: Edward I, Eleanor of Castile (as in Eleanor Crosses - we’ll come to soon → 5.Strand); William de Valence (Henry III’s ‘turbulent half-brother’); the Confessor himself, commandeering the entire chevet. There’s Edward III, too, and Richard II in bronze alongside Anne of Bohemia. One does not wish to dwell, for all is available in guidebooks. I will only mention Henry V’s table tomb and oaken effigy, and for one reason only: its silver plate was nicked, the head now fibre-glass (‘polyester resin’) by Louisa Bolt, a touch of the Brighton Pavilion minarets, or Buxton Memorial (we saw), even St. Lawrence Jewry (→ 8.City). And that still leaves the other Henrys and their wives. Oh, and the Virgin Queen. Poets Corner. Livingstone (note his primary plot, reflecting his personification of Empire to the Victorians). Angela Burdett-Coutts, General Gordon (near the west door). Seek out Lord Lawrence, Viceroy of India (John Maird Laird Lawrence ; no doubt source of the Foreign Office interview gag [i] and study text of Kimball O’Hara), whose bronze we’ll see in Waterloo Place (→20.Pall Mall), a servant of the East India Company, ruling during the Sepoy Mutiny, setting up Simla .... all that. The theme of Empire rumbles through these pages - the East India Company, Clive and Twining’s Tea ....
The marbled, granite mausoleum, ecclesiastical Madame Tussauds, as many have joked, except that, of course, they indeed have wax effigies stored away here, somewhere ....
Argh!
Nevertheless, beside all that high jinks, a place of spatial magic. Indeed, this is where we need to focus (and not on the myriad disposables). Consider then the cloister-eliding aisles; the mathematical complexity of chevet (ambulatory), itself a kind of architectural Rubik’s Cube; the hidden staircases in the columns which lead surreptitiously up to platform where lie Henry V and Catherine of Valois. Ah! This really is what we’re coming to, this sequence of enfilading and eliding volumes, this fluidity of space, interplay of aperture and wall, a medieval armature of time travel. The years 1437-41; royal mason John Thirsk erected a pair of octagonal turrets deeply cut with niches, filled them with statues of saints and benefactors (all but three surviving today). Inside are the winding newel stairs that lead, some say, not only up to the shrine platform but .... down, down to subterranean vaults which link to Parliament, to No.10, the labyrinthine underground network that serves the entire metropolis, complements the Underground, the Mail Rail, operates from closed tube stations, blocked up air raid shelters, off-limits rooms and passages such as Cockpit Passage (→ 3.Whitehall), steel sanctuaries with secure cabling and piped air supplies, piped heating (or cooling) and sound for those tense days after the holocaust (Desert Island Discs?). Perhaps too a link from those canopied stalls to the strange hidden ‘opera boxes ‘of Gibbons at St. Pauls, the spiral stairs twirling down to re-emerge in the City in case of French invasion or nuclear fall-out?
Turning, turning
In the widening gyre
Iron tracks, locked vaults, hermetically sealed tombs for the selected few in the post-apocalypse scenario. Just a door- knock away from the coy Churchill War Rooms. “What’s behind there?” was the last thing the medal-wearing OAP was heard to say. But no need to speculate; there is enough here to divert and beguile without entering the fantasists’, conspiracy-scenting mind, the New Age millenarianists, eschatologists, seekers after alternative Goth worlds. Consider simply the stairs worn by knees of pilgrims. Twenty years to build[i], the carving possibly by John Massingham (‘the English Donatello’) acting rather independently of Yevele’s faithfulness to earlier work[ii].
And now, behold a bridge, parapets to either side, flanks deeply chiselled for statuary (as per the stair turrets), the centrally placed coronation scenes. On the platform, the damaged effigy of Henry and Catherine of Valois, staring prone into the squeezed geometry of vaults above where a carved boss is a hollow Crown of Heaven (to be exchanged for this earthly one). Beyond this, the confining wall of reredos, again cut deep with niche and, at one time, statues (dispatched by Henry VIII), all crammed into the central, easternmost ambulatory arch where one final chapel, like those of St. Nicholas, Edmund and so forth, should be, which here becomes, via a crafty segue, a mere narthex (lobby, anteroom) to the vast shrine to end all shrines, the view of which is thus forever veiled.
Round up your sheep, they say, so here goes. Queen Elizabeth Chapel (N aisle): Queen Elizabeth and half-sister Mary I. Lady Margaret Beaufort’s Chapel (South Aisle): Lady Margaret Beaufort Pietro Torrigiano; Mary Queen of Scots. Behind the high altar, at last, Henry VII himself and Elizabeth of York – more bronze Torrigiano. Carpigiani? Oh, and before said altar, the stone to Edward VI.
So then, sneak under the platform and enter. Henry VII’s Chapel, the apotheosis and acme of the medieval shrine and chantry, proffers a casket of blisteringly ornate delicacy, a veritable coral reef of filigree organic forms (belying the underlying utilitarian structure). As for the pendants dangling from the memorably termed ‘conoids’ – a mystery how they stay up. The barnacled effect (marine metaphors are inescapable) of such textural density, such tactility and grit, must have been remarked upon ad infinitum.
We must view outside. I take from Christopher Wilson the extraordinary rippled surfaces of the crimped windows , with all that density of blank panelling (designed to make the whole wall one homogeneous surface). One does indeed get a sense of Japanese folding screen, precisely to ‘screen out’ unwanted interest from passersby, yet, of course, within affording multi-directional views of the surrounding buildings. In between, the series of bouncy castle turrets with their knobbly phallic tops - okay, let’s say pepper pot (or beehive - like Kings, Cambridge) in place of buttresses, strangely organic forms one associates with the Marsh Arabs, sharing that apparent insubstantiality, hollowness and lack of robustness (seen also at Rochester, by the way).
Anyway, it’s good to be outside again.
Now I feel a little better
What a treat to hear Thy Word
Where the bones of leading statesmen
Have so often been interr'd.
And now, dear Lord, I cannot wait
Because I have a luncheon date.
A glimpse back at Hawksmoor's towers, pointing up the lack of central tower ... Ah, well, of course, there was one: the Confessor’s, embroidered into the Bayeux Tapestry; and Henry III began another, in the 1250s, never finished. 150 years on came an octagonal lantern, as per Ely, in turn demolished in the sixteenth century. Wren mooted a 372 foot spire, in 1710 (the wooden model is on display, viewable online[ii]) and ever-daring Hawksmoor produced not one but a range of options, including another lantern. However, when George I died in 1727 the Abbey had to be cleared of scaffolding for the coronation and construction was abandoned, the stump capped with a temporary roof[iii]. The base of the lantern was burnt in 1803 and again in 1941.
Consider once more the height, ungainly but on this Taillebourg-redeeming transept front - Reigate and Bath stone intermixed – fully vindicated. This front is every bit as important as the west, more so, due to its original facing onto the Royal Palace. Very Île de France, a triptych of deep, gabled porches with statuary in the jambs, rose window above, horizontal storey demarcations and double rows of flying buttresses over the aisles, all under a tall ornamented gable. All Scott’s work, of course.
In view of all the refs to Scott so far, we need to introduce thee man (and all his clan) at some point: we mentioned briefly Giles Scott at Westminster RC (→ 1.Victoria).
The hidden South Transept front is a replica, so its seclusion need not concern us – again faithfully executed by Scott, including similar rose but heavier pinnacles justified on the basis of a find in the ruins .... Oh well. Ditto the anachronistic plate-traceried gable.
The serried ranks of fliers above the cloister were necessitated by the elision of aisle and cloister (as already alluded): from the cloister garth we see no less than four ‘floors’ with three serried ranks of supports (n.b. this is a many-floored place: the north transept boasts five). The ‘flying’ continues around the Chapter House, if less spectacularly than Lincoln. It once was, of course, the English Parliament.
Flying in circular motion .... what we are about ...
We turn our heel and now, by way of restitution, refreshment, find our way to the porch of St. Margaret’s, the MPs’ parish church. A slice of rural England, village green, transported to sit among the overbearing giants. One is entirely seduced into the conceit, imagining away the surroundings, the gothic hulks of Parliament and Abbey, bureaucratic weight of Whitehall, finding oneself momentarily in an unprepossessing market town. Within, the cool Perpendicular arcades and oaken roof bespeak East Anglia. And Scott in restoration mode.
Here too. For John Harvey, that medieval dreamer, a personal favourite: “one of the happiest and most charmingly designed of all, a sanctuary in which one may rest after the strenuous task of appreciating the glories of the Abbey’.
Thus recuperated, we may face, at last – well, you’d need a whole day, of course, if that’s still possible in the post 9/11, post 7/7 world – that which has been beckoning from the moment we set foor in this City, began this chapter.
Will you, wo’n’t you, will you, wo’n’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you, wo’n’t you, will you, wo’n’t you, wo’n’t you join the dance?
The citadel of democracy itself; the blueprint, not only constitutionally, jurisprudentially but architecturally also, for replicas all across the territories of Empire. Houses of Parliament, Palace of Westminster, as you will, Pugin’s campanile the irrepressible symbol of the capital - of the country itself - outdoing Barry’s skyscraping Victoria Tower. A preference, incidentally, emblematic of the worst miscarriage of justice in architectural history (so it goes), with Barry simply doing the plans and elevations while Pugin laboured long nights on the minutiae of decorative detail, producing, for the House of Lords alone, over two thousand drawings. Barry made his fortune while Pugin languished, then, to add insult to injury, when a clock tower was needed, when they had trawled the whole country to find anyone (anyone but Pugin, that incompetent and expensive idler!) they came back. To him. And paid once more a pittance. Thus runs the rubric.
Well, Barry was no slouch with Gothic forms, let’s be clear; was a master of the Cinquecento and Quattrocento, a genius at the assembly of forms to serve function. That’s all his. He too laboured unto death, let’s not forget. And his great Victoria Tower stands, still the highest gothic edifice in these islands, holding its own with many a glass and concrete multi-use excrescence. Only abroad - in Europe or the New World do we find higher. Incidentally, I exclude Liverpool Anglican which is more or less the same height anyway and much more recent; also, just to put the lid on this, Barry’s rises in one vertical leap to the pinnacles (higher than the central crowning cage work holding the flagpole). A case of El Capitan vs. the Half-Dome, perhaps, but crucial nonetheless. Opinions vary on height: anything from 348 feet in the Survey of London (1878[i], when it was the world’s tallest square tower) to 420 feet to the top of the ‘vane’, the Wiki rating being 323 feet (tower) and 395 feet (vane – also confirmed by the official site and Pevsner). So, barely higher than its chronometered rival. It is reached by the longest unbroken staircase in the world. Barry chose this, rather than Big Ben, for his brass in Westminster Abbey; perhaps because it was ‘not Pugin’, and certainly because it was his proudest achievement.
Big Ben itself is striking in another way: size; it is, bluntly speaking, well named (though the sobriquet applies to its principle tintinnabulary element rather than the tower, of course, of late renamed from St. Stephens’s to The Queen Elizabeth - Big Lizzie in due course .... ). Facts are unavoidable here. At 316 feet (Pevsner and Wiki) or 320 feet (Man on the Clapham Omnibus), it’s the highest clock tower around, though ‘Big Joe’ in Birmingham is reputedly 328 feet; however, girth is important in these matters: 29 feet for the provincial challenger against 40 here, so, while ‘Joe’ is tall - no doubt about that, it’s a biggie – the ‘Ben’ has bulk, and sits so solidly it must take the candle. It radiates that elusive and all-important quality, the sublime. The sheer immensity transports us beyond the desiderata of facts and figures, or of architectural merit, stylistic choice, decorative language. To the smooth red Accrington brickwork of Big Joe, we have this dense ribbing of endless repeated blank panelling, taking to its possible limits the Perpendicular idiom manifest across the road at Henry VII’s Chapel. It carries a certain inexplicable authority as well as a message of ‘no expense spared’, though, applied to such a vast acreage of Clipsham stone, it reduces in scale to so much spindly fluting.
The Central Tower is the least noticed among the three major verticals but, aside from reaching 300 feet, just as essential, and in more than one respect: it provides a fitting crown to the Central Lobby where MPs and supplicants, the press and every other interest group mingle, an enclosed space that serves as a courtyard, quadrangle, covered trading floor, atrium or market for this cold and wet latitude; externally, it furnishes the centrepiece in that wonderful jumbled profile of miscellaneous towers, the fairy tale ensemble; finally, more essential and prosaic than all of this, as originally intended , a sort of vast central ventilating shaft for the whole building.
There are , of course, a host of lesser towers, that is the thrill of the place – if one were to count the towers, turrets, flêches, pinnacles .... one would soon tire. The largest Perpendicular building – anywhere, period. Some 960 feet from the Ben (QE, St. Stephen's) to the Victoria. Does it compete in size, affekt , with the internal spaces of a York Minster or Kings College Chapel? We do not have to look far to find an authentic medieval hall both wider and higher than any of its inner chambers, or a royal chapel that exceeds by far the invention of its filigree adornment and, finally, to rub it in, an ancient minster whose vaults tower higher[i] and are more pleasingly conveyed than any here, in this Victorian palace of revivalist varieties.
But nevertheless .... not bad, is it?
Before we enter, glance back at the figure of Cromwell, ‘Our Chief of Men’ where once a year a coterie of latter-day Puritans (“Are you Roundhead or Cavalier? Let’s see haha!” the boys would scream after swimming, flicking from wet towels the explosive whiplash). And here, the devotees gather to pay their respects outside the monument to the supreme dévot.
We go inside (in the mind, of course, come with me!) Among the 1100 rooms, there is that procession of royal state apartments, rooms, which the tours make all too familiar but space I fear is running out – certainly your patience, dear reader, and your legs no doubts (or wings) so, single out the inevitable and inescapable Royal Gallery, 100 feet long and fifty wide (dwarfed by Westminster Hall) with the wall-consuming murals to Nelson and Wellington (and Charles IV getting in on the act - see also Windsor Castle Waterloo Room → 30.West) thus continuing the posthumous battle that pits Nelson’s Column against Wellington Arch, Trafalgar Square against Waterloo Place, and so on, almost ad infinitum, in the metropolis and up and down the realm.
Gieves and Hawkes managed to deal with both.
Getting in on the act, eh? Happened so often with us: Butch, Gemmell, Ali .... Tweedeldum and Tweedledee
If the Royal Gallery has the art, then the next room has the carving. The House of Lords famously required over two thousand numbered, detailed drawings from Pugin: metal, wood, glass, cloth, paper and every appurtenance down to inkstands and doorknobs. Desk lids, foot-rests. It’s very shiny: all that glisters, like those stalls in the Abbey but ... there is a but here, much though one admires Blore. Bellini vs. Raphael (or Verdi); Sansovino vs. Palladio, Baker vs. Soane. Competence, not genius.
In opposition to the red of the Lords is the green leathered Commons. The house colour is not Monopoly Board but ecclesiastically inspired, like so much on our journey ahead. The tiered seating either side, the galleries, the Speaker’s chair where once the altar stood (still nodded at) and, as with judicial courts, the garments and rigmarole to sanctify if not entirely mystify the machinations of power. Yet, with all this green terracing, one could be at Wimbledon, or again, in their compact cosiness, the wells of Heffer's or Blackwell’s. A peculiarly subconscious national imperative at work.
Who are these men (not women, mostly) that act on our behalf? What is it that they do precisely? The answer lies in the offices and committee rooms lining the endless corridors and forming the Westminster ‘Village’, a community of thousands and, in terms of power and reach, a small city with the exclusive appointments of ‘the best club in town’ to boot: libraries, restaurants, lounges, smoking rooms, bars, secretarial, travel and business services of every kind – so much facility, in fact, as to mimic a cruise-ship or, more aptly still, a transatlantic liner such as the Queen Mary. For anyone who has had a night on board at the permanent mooring at Long Beach, a discombobulating experience, disquieting and faintly sinister. But, anchored here, quite the reverse, all very much alive (no joke intended, milord), as if transported back into the twenties to the jive and foxtrot on the parquet and linoleum, the walnut and mahogany, the Art Deco handrails and lamp stands, the choo chin chow and ..... And all those courtyards. An Oxbridge college. Of course! Or Victorian public school, whose products have moved seamlessly via Oxbridge over the years, from quad to quad - the mobster quadrille.
Will you walk a little faster ... The mighty bulk of this largest of all London’s civic buildings – and, by that, I exclude warehouses, stadia, exhibition halls, railway sheds and all other ersatz ‘architecture’, those empty structures unacquainted with masonry or brick, devoid of proper walls or ceilings, bereft of integral furniture or fittings, scant of articulated surface or traceried fenestration – forgive me, there’s so much of it now, spreading like so much insectile cacoonery, and that includes much of the latter day G.G. Scott so ubiquitously fostered – is from close to, compromised, partial, hidden, sliced by the bulk of the Abbey at the perpendicular (both senses), opened only on the Commons side at Big Ben, and at the secluded lower flank at Victoria Tower Gardens. This Palace of Westminster, this ‘proper’ structure, reassuringly solid, replete with every conceivable artifice and decorative implant encrusting every surface. Pugin’s magnum opus, a labour unequalled since the medieval masons (unless by Barry himself, whose life, as already mentioned, was similarly cut short, as were Street and Bentley’s by architectural endeavour) - is somehow, due to its vast scale, and for most observers, seen only at a distance, the overall effect sedate, reposeful, sublime, completing perfectly the sunset for Terry and Julie (who feel safer on the north bank). The relentless vertical articulation combined with the multiplicity of vertically projecting elements, the fiercely close detailing, is there to alleviate an overwhelming horizontal, angular and ultimately ‘classical’ form; as such, it consolidates and at the same time transcends the two great architectural traditions of the West. God’s work, as the cathedral masons would say, meant for God’s eyes, not man’s.
In amongst all this is a ghost. Well, quite a few, actually. Little passageways, vaulted spaces, windows whose mottled, weathered stone clearly predates the Victorians. Here was St. Stephens Chapel and many a medieval passageway and staircase. Yet, we need not rely on imagination, for there is still one very substantial relic: I speak, of course, of Westminster Hall, the cavernous space that overwhelms Members and visitors alike, the largest hammer beam (68 x 240 ft) in existence, 13 trusses with 40 inch beams, a sort of inverted Mary Rose, so powerfully charismatic and defiantly anachronistic as to flout the Metropolis’s thirst for reinvention and faddish make-over, or cruel abandonment. A repudiation of all the fugitive, nomadic, ephemeral that grips the Metropolis and a view through the Looking Glass to an age of timelessness, where craftsmanship operated in ‘forever time’. A 660 ton living testament to that woody world of once forested England: cue Robin Hood and his Merry Men, peasants snuckering into bark houses in their cloth cowls, eating off hand-tooled oaken tables. Ha! We now know the extent of forest was far less than previously thought, simply because – hello! - it needed men to plant it. We know that English people have never been any good at carving, in any case - else why has every last bit of real wood furniture – never mind ‘hand-carved’ - disappeared into antique showrooms or warehouses in the New Celestial Kingdom? The Middle Ages may have been different but Hurley and Herland were cosmopolitan types. Hence March, Martock, Needham Market, Trunch, Snettisham, Ely and all the rest – Oxford, St. David’s, Middle Temple, Hampton Court, Stokesay, the Great Bed of Ware and Great Coxwell Barn – must all have been bought at IKEA, the middle ages version of, anyway. The screen at King’s? Italian. Gibbons? Born a Dutchman. I rest my case.
And, as if we needed more proof of a vanished world, there is of course the Jewel Tower, the one other survivor of the drastic fire of 1834. It’s outside, across the road, by Victoria Tower, in Old Palace Yard (we’re back where Nick Robinson gives his daily reports on the latest state of the Euro) – providing another time machine moment, telekinetically transporting us, in moated Kentish ragstone, to the 14th century - here, improbably marooned by its seasonal half-moat of the Tyburn, is this redundant metaphor, looking for all the world like a fragment of the Tower of London transposed by some subterranean upheaval.
Time to head on. The new MPs offices across the road - Portcullis House – a grotesque, post-modern effrontery, a dreadful punning joke that’s so loud it drowns the traffic, trumpeting tomfoolery and bombast, the thrusting spokes of chimneys come to think of it, like Staffordshire kilns or Kent oasthouses. If the exterior is supposed to mimic Parliament, then the vaulted atrium becomes the Central Hall – and good on Hopkins et al for making that connection. But its boast as the most expensive office building ever (no proof) is entirely due to the subterranean works for the Jubilee Line, i.e. Westminster Underground Station. The only place (aside perhaps from Canary Wharf → 9.East) in which to get a real purchase on the scale of what goes on underground, appreciating that, for example, Kings Cross-St. Pancras is as colossal as any Overground terminus or interchange. The proverbial ice-berg .... Also, they had to make sure of the Ben: if that toppled it would make a fine mess; and bury the underground caverns they allegedly dug for our elected representatives in the advent of Armageddon. Linking into Henry V’s tomb .... all that.
Talking of underground retreats, back to Whitehall. No, wait, I’ve got it! Not kilns or old time breweries. They are, aren’t they, the massive furnaces, once ubiquitous from Margam to Redcar. The way the tubes gather in a conical embrace before merging into the final vertical thrust of stack! So much hot air!
Footnote
[i] Interview for Foreign Office. Interviewer: ”Just a spelling test, old boy, nothing to it. Now then, here we are: ‘Air’. (Candidate): “A-i-r”. “Good! Now try this one: Hair”. (He again answers correctly). “Jolly good! Splendid! Now, the difficult one: Lair”. (Again, answers correctly). “Well done! Super! Now put them all together.” “Air-hair-lair”. Interviewer jumps up, beaming, pumps his hand: “Air-hair-lair! Welcome aboard, old chap!”