Andrew Ashdown

LONDON NOW:

An Oyssey Through the Nation's Capital

 

3 WHITEHALL

 

We’ve come to the first address on the Monopoly Board. Whitehall, £140. Is this it? The setting for government? Administrative avenue for the capital, executive thoroughfare, royal festive route? For a world city? Once the greatest empire the world has ever seen (geographically, demographically)? Where is our Acropolis, Forum, Campidoglio? Citadel, Kremlin, Zǐjinchéng? Pennsylvania Avenue, Nevsky Prospect, Unter den Linden, Champs Elysees? The feint at grand buildings is evident, yet .... On our left, flanking Parliament Square, granted, immense structures, divided by the lost canyon of King Charles Street. But that’s about it. The rest is ... iterative, ramshackle, self-effacing, almost.

 

Nothing better encapsulates this than the memorial that dominates this lower end. You may wish to chance the traffic as more than a passing glance is needed. One could almost miss Lutyens' Cenotaph, that most enigmatic of memorials in this, the most iconic of all remembrance sites. Miss it in the bustle, certainly, when a Boris or open top ‘Big Bus’ comes to a halt. Or delivery van; or outside broadcast vehicle. And it isn’t just a matter of size. It’s also simplicity – staggering simplicity. As one said of the Washington Monument, it merely says:

 

“Here!” 

 

Well, precisely. Appallingly modest. Well-mannered. English, disingenuously so. Of course!

 

But of course, there’s more going on here. If you dare brave the traffic, and have the time and inclination, press closely and observe the entasis, curving sides which observe an imaginary spot 980 feet above the plinth; horizontals which, if followed, would meet far underground. The ultimate exercise in the geometrical proportioning of a plain surface. Within sight, the 2005 Women’s Memorial merely underscores the point - choosing to duck comparison, going for contrasting, repudiating bronze, using figurative sculpture, something Lutyens resolutely avoided. And not of women, neither; rather, empty uniforms – just hanging there - a macabre effect.

 

Understatement alright, but not so Clive of India, though installed just few years earlier by fellow imperialist, Lord Curzon, at the end of said chasm between the Foreign Office and Treasury buildings – overlooking the park on Scott’s (or perhaps Digby Wyatt’s) steps. Things had changed in the interim, somewhat. But they would have understood. This tension between Edwardian bombast and the stiff upper lip; the very thread on which the whole caboodle hung.

 

Still hangs?

 

Well, the thread has begun. We’ve encountered it already with Livingstone and Lord Lawrence, and it continues here, outside the offices of the Diplomatic Service, to re-emerge all along our route: at Canada, South Africa and India Houses, Bush House, Australia House .... and all the multifarious manifestations of the East India Company (see Box in → 5.Strand); in matters more than architectural or sculptural, linking characters, buildings and places, things (tea-bags) in a shared legacy. The pomp of Victorian and Edwardian architecture proclaiming the confidence and savoir fare of a bygone age. With composure.

 

So, from monoliths to monolithic. The Treasury or ‘GOGGS’ (Government Offices Great George Street), underneath which Churchill’s Bunker Cabinet War Rooms protected by the early use of a reinforced concrete Hennebique-Michel frame. Incidentally – and it is only incidental – refurbishment by our latter-day George Gilbert Scott: courtyards, wells, etc., including glass roofs à la British Museum Great Court (→ 16.Bloomsbury). Sustainability, environment, etc .... The inner, circular loggia (preserved), a circle set within a square, is an obvious classical allusion but also the legacy of Gibbs’ planned rebuilding of the Palace. More of that anon.

 

Linked by a triple archway, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is the (real) Scott’s unenthused Italianate contribution, his hand forced by Palmerston, with its high belvedere over St. James Park, what Boadicea is to Big Ben - a superfluous adjunct, nonetheless irresistible to photographers and the producers of postcards and witless guidebooks – the stairs and Locarno Suite a suitably weighty, classical setting for the process of government, the visits by foreign dignitaries the ebb and flow of commercial transactions masquerading as diplomacy. Scott’s revenge would come at St. Pancras.

 

The glazed Durbar Court and Belvedere – not Scott but Matthew Digby Wyatt – the chap who did the Curzon steps (scion of that prolific architectural clan and architect to the East India Company). He did the glass at Paddington and the rebuilt Crystal Palace too. So Foster was not the first to play this game: see also Barry’s Reform Club (→ 20.Pall Mall). n.b. there are remnants of the Company’s old premises here (see Old East India House → 8.City and the aforementioned East India Company Box in → 5.Strand ). Yet, somehow, disappointingly, anti-climax follows. Inside, the entrance hall and grand staircase to the Locarno Suite are testimony to the emptiness of British boast. The domed ceiling with its worthies is fine but where is our Élysée or Vladimirsky Hall, our Galerie des Glaces? If you want to impress foreign guests, then all these dumplings – Lancaster, Marlborough, Spencer, Buck House itself - will not suffice. The best we have is probably just up the road (there in just a moment) unless you were to use the Palace of Westminster itself, and that with the Queen’s permission, since the Royal Gallery nearest fits the bill. Again, one could use Middle Temple Hall, or perhaps the Guildhall, or the Painted Hall at Greenwich, mighty Westminster Hall ..... But are these truly up to scratch? The latter, a little cold and draughty, surely? All that wood. The Great Hall at Lambeth, Eltham or Hampton Court, perhaps. St. George’s Hall at Windsor - a little narrow but, well, if you are going to run India with a single detachment of soldiers, 400 Tommies against several hundreds of millions, then subterfuge and window-dressing would seem to be the order of the day, de rigueur. It’s no accident the grandest room of all is at Osborne. That too is a Durbar; with belvederi.

 

Up the road? Yes, of course, this whole area was once occupied by but a single building, Whitehall Palace – well, a sort of royal village, really, that had more rooms than Versailles or the Vatican. To get a sense of what this must have been like, we have only to go to the Inns or Court (→ 6.Holborn) – the huddle of courts, halls, passageways, unplanned shambling, rambling, inchoate entities in which was conducted the business of government and the Court by its officers and attendant army of drudges - courtiers, clerks, messengers and the like, all busy and hurried about their business.

 

Had various plans been realised, it would have spread its serried courts on both sides of the thoroughfare that now bears its name, all the way from the Embankment to St. James Park. Hence the odd circular colonnade – á la Trajan’s Palace, Tivoli - in the courtyard of ‘GOGGS’ - as if these buildings were a geological imprint of what had gone before – Spalato, Tivoli - like those fields you see forever humped in rows of Neolithic waves whose purpose remains elusive to the likes of Sir Tony Baldrick.

 

And, had other plans been realised, all this would have been swept away by Leslie Martin in the fifti

 

It had, of course, its function hall, the Banqueting House, the one surviving element of the outlandish scheme. With its clear double-storied interior space and nine-panelled Rubens ceiling, it was the biggest step forward since the Norman Conquest, more shocking than Lubetkin and Tecton in the ‘50s. An architectural ‘Eroica’. It’s now the one substantially intact, authentic remnant, aside from the fragment in the Ministry of Defence Garden. Along with the Queens House, Greenwich [→ 9.East) and St. Pauls, Covent Garden (→ 5.Strand), it is one of the series of epoch-making, standard-bearing ‘firsts’ that Inigo Jones placed in various strategic locations across the country to get the Renaissance belatedly underway.

 

It was inspired by Sansovino’s Biblioteca Marciana in Venice (1537-53)[i]. Of course, that may have been derived from Michelangelo’s Bibliotheca Laurenziana in Florence, (1523-71) - an astonishing work, when you come to think of it, which may also have inspired Palladio’s Basilica della Ragione in Vicenza (1549-1615) and, more securely, Wren’s Trinity College Library (1676-95). Seems they all had to wait a long time for completion. n.b. Scamozzi, whom Jones met, did the adjoining Procuratie on St. Mark’s Square.

 

Well, despite Cromwell, Jones’s magnum opus is, with the recent renovation, looking as new, open for business again, bringing in the London Walks guides and their eager retinues. Note the clear space, open through two floors and 55 feet to Rubens’ nine panels in a grid of guilloche decorated beams and ovals.

 

The drawings for Whitehall Palace were mostly by Jones’s pupil and graphic amanuensis Webb, after discussion with his boss. There were in fact two iterations: one of 630 x 460 ft and one double that, 1280 x 950 ft , i.e. twice the size of the Escorial[ii] with seven courts, one an immense 800 x 400 feet, plus a circular ‘Persian’ Court possibly influenced by the old Tuileries. Another remnant of Spalato. Later, of course, Wren had his own Whitehall Palace plans – and a lot else, of course.

 

Imagine it! You would have entered somewhere near where Earl Haig’s equestrian statue is, passing the Banqueting House on your right and continuing right up to the Old War Office, where a facsimile of the Banqueting House (one of four) abutted the courtyard’s northern range which then ran all across from DEFRA (Min of Fish, Food, Ag whatever the latest permutation – 1909 by J.W. Murray) to embrace Ripley’s Admiralty (1723-26) and Adam’s Screen (1759-61) before meeting the eastern range and thereby include the whole of Kent’s Horse Guards. But this is the thing: beyond all this, the outer courts would have more than trebled this footprint; to the west (left), taking in the whole of Horse Guards Parade up to the Guards Memorial and to the right, reaching the Ministry of Defence and Whitehall Mansions, even unto Victoria Embankment Gardens. However, for all its impressive scale, it would not have aligned well with the river (if we follow the Banqueting House alignment); would not have ‘talked’ to the riverscape at all and, more seriously, have blocked movement from Westminster into the West End and the City. And thus our chosen route! That would never do, though again, we can always take wing.

 

It’s also an important ‘hidden’ artery: part of, as has been well described, the processional route that comes into being in an ad hoc, extemporary fashion, along The Mall to Admiralty Arch and Trafalgar Square, down Whitehall to the Cenotaph and into Parliament Square. The capital is full of such intermittent, fugitive, transient routes which, unlike the Haussmann’s Grandes Boulevards, remain appropriately out of mind most of the time. Others cater for, of course, the Lord Mayor’s Procession and various athletic events of recent memory. Westminster to St. Pauls and all watering points in-between.

 

These various plans (preserved at Chatsworth) inaugurated what might be called the ‘Counter-Reformation’ in English architecture of the C18th, in other words, the glorious flowering of the arts under Charles II for which ultimately we must, without a hint of irony, thank Cromwell and the Puritans.

 

And if the Foreign Office falls short, then Downing Street continues the deceit, itself the epitome of this Harry Potterish, Pooterish approach – the disingenuous, because deliberately flunked, attempt at secrecy, dissembling, false modesty, self-parody, disarming reticence, call it what you will - public school reserve, gentlemanly (becoming) conduct, savoir faire, élan. The Cenotaph ethos. ‘It’s just not done’ is the mantra, the incantation of U and non-U. All meet in this ultimate coup de theatre of the ‘small house’ that, oh so cleverly, belies much grander things beyond. Yet not so grand. Ah! Perhaps in a desire to detract from what is, even in the larger house, still undeniably modest, they made this connecting hallway, this conceit, and so escaped through the rabbit-hole, the cupboard door of self-deprecation and apology. “Of course, it’s not meant to be large .... democracy and all that ....” Well. Now you can’t even go and have your photo snapped with the duty constable – as one did in 1970. Not even into the cul-de-sac. And if you have a pass, and a bicycle, beware the police.

 

Round the corner from Downing Street an impressive frontage, remarkably restrained, houses the Cabinet Office. One has to go to Talman’s Chatsworth south front for analogue. Kent, Barry and Soane all had a hand - spot the join.

 

And we must not ignore Dover House, the Scottish Office (for the time being, at any rate), with slender, widely spaced araeostyle columns and rusticated wall, the domed rotunda with pink Tuscan columns, one of, well, innumerable Georgian gems hereabout, along with, in the interests of PC and symmetry, the Welsh Office across the way – Gwydyr House - brown brick and ‘sparse’ stone dressings’ and a fine Venetian window.

 

In amongst all this is, or was, our first gateway - appropriately close to the bigger one coming up ahead. Whitehall Gate – the ‘Holbein Gate’ - built by Henry VIII in 1532 and demolished in 1759, for long thought to have been designed by Holbein who – another rumour - may have lived inside it. Did he inspire the current architect occupant of the Soane arch at Tyringham, Buckinghamshire? It had three storeys with gryphons and shields .... as another abandoned arch, of course did, still does. Also by Wren.

 

Oh, I forgot, amid all this reverie, across the wide road, 19th Century Richmond Terrace with frontage by William Whitfield & Partners, completed in the late 1980s, now the Department of Health. Another stripy echo of our cathedral, though paler, a citrus orange (in the westering sun) and with something too of the Perpendicular idiom of Henry VII’s Chapel. Well, the source is actually just behind: Shaw’s New Scotland Yard. Some lucky MPs have their offices there – the ‘Norman Shaw Building’ as now is – elegance epitomised, though in its day the stripy brick and Portland stone, the corner cylinder turrets, were all quite racy. Like ‘Portcullis’, to which we have suddenly returned.

 

Richmond House stood here, home of Charles Stuart 3rd Duke of Richmond and his wife ‘La Belle Stuart’ and, after it became government offices another was built alongside for Charles Lennox, the 1st Duke of the recreated title [Encycl. p.693] altered by Wyatt and destroyed by fire in 1791.

 

From here Canaletto painted both Whitehall (with the Holbein Gate) and the view toward St. Pauls. But rather than detail these views just take in the buildings as the nameless jumble they are and the river with its anonymous craft – enjoy the scene, do not seek to label everything in sight. You’ll, see this is a bee-in-the-bonnet of mine. ....

 

So we continue up. Unavoidable now, the Ministry of Defence. Here we are, in Washington, a slice of the Pentagon – or rather segment – which somewhat defeats the purpose (even with the new glass roofs, continuing the Barry-Wyatt-Foster tradition). It’s pre-war, E. Vincent Harris, he of the civic buildings in Manchester, which also evince a sort of rationalised classicism. Doors open north and south, away from the curious; statues to now unfashionable heroes – Slim, Monty, Alanbrooke - keep vigil . Still more exotic are the characters - Gordon, Wingate – who keep watch by the river.

 

Opposite is the Old War Office, Edwardian Baroque, in the same regimented – regimental one could say – Portland stone but supplemented by magnesian from York. With segmental pedimented pavilion ends, pepper-pot domes, a building easily overlooked among the louder offerings, it’s by Clyde Young who took over when his father died, assisted by Sir John Taylor of H.M. Office of Works. Within, a rather splendid staircase off the entrance foyer. The block is trapezoidal, an abutment of rectangular and triangular courts. A triangle added to a rectangle – the conjunction of 4 + 3 = 7, yielding prima facie five - but within, seven ....

 

Similar to Belfast’s College of Technology. It’s an elided, sublimated version of Belfast City Hall and the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta or, again, the Port of Liverpool Building on the Pierhead.

 

Now up for sale, as apartments ....

 

So, finally, Whitehall Court which rolls a vast French chateau (Pevsner’s ‘Chambord’) along the Embankment, easily mistaken for yet another civil servant bastion, the jostling rooflines melding seamlessly with the attached National Liberal Club by Waterhouse, whose cylindrical corner tower in turn echoes that of the Old War Office. As does its triangular plan .... echo the triangular ..... OK, got it. Now we have the ‘One Whitehall Place’ conference facility and Guoman Royal Horseguards Hotel. Yup. And across the road on Northumberland Avenue (£160 on the game board) the story too is of hotels - Victoria, Metropole, now Corinthia - requisitioned for war and demobbed again. At Northumberland House, one sat the Civil Service entrance exam

 

“Air-hair-lair?” Oh, well, never mind.

 

Back to Whitehall and straight ahead to the Holy of Holies. This time Kent alone, with only oversight from Burlington. The Horse Guards has to be my favourite place, well, favourite open space, okay, favourite hardcore, gravelled, non-grass open space – in London. And that has nothing to do with the postcard of ‘Trooping the Colour’ sent by grandparents across the thousands of miles. No. This is aesthetic: so fugitive, subliminal, you’re most likely to pass it by. You do not seek it; rather, it steals upon you. For a start, there’s that hidden rabbit-hole, platform 9¾ , coat cupboard moment when, instead of following the throng up Whitehall, you see the gap and veer off on a different tangent: you step onto the magic carpet, almost without realising.

 

Pushing through the indecorous camera-wielding tourists chafing the toy soldiers (you may get a clash of silver sabre and bridle as the relief trots in) you go through the tunnel (very brief), a low arch - Hogarth’s headless driver - to the other side - of the coat cupboard. Light bursts ahead and there appears a line of rustling plane trees, veiling St. James Park, with a truncated obelisk and line of expressionless bronze figures. The traffic and hubbub are forgotten in the sudden stillness. You stare about to find yourself on a surface as flat and bare as the desert, as pristine as the moon: clean gravel spread evenly over the surface, without indication as to where to walk, let alone park (only the Monarch rides, and then by horse) – no cars, no signs, no ice-cream kiosk, no loos, no PC info points, no environmental justification or health and safety gobbledegook; no seats, no chairs, no park attendants - just this remorseless stone plain, a tiny section of the Tanezruft reg in Mali while, all about, engrossing interest: the back of No.10 over its familiar wall; Admiralty Extension (or Old Admiralty Building – ‘OAB’) evocation of the Thin Red Line notwithstanding, a hymn to Queen Anne, its verdigris copper dome and twin mastabas still with rigging aloft (once the latest word in high-tech semaphore and shutter telegraph communication); through the verdure, gilded Victoria Memorial and the royal standard signalling occupation; at right, Admiralty Citadel (linked to Churchill Museum & Cabinet War Rooms via that mesmerising labyrinth – a wormhole into the whole area of London fortifications from the Romans to the Normans, the Civil War, the Napoleonic Wars, both Worlds Wars and post-9/11).

 

Admiralty Arch, Carlton House Terrace, all comfortably distant. But here now, on this spot, at this moment – nothing. The odd civil servant or misdirected tourist but well spaced; they do not tarry. The lonely, anomalous Chief of Combined Operations in faux Nelsonian pose, the motionless Guardsmen – bronze (1926 H.C. Bradshaw architect, Gilbert Ledward sculptor)and the largely motionless living - underscore the stillness.

 

Horse Guards itself is the architectural frame, the arrangement of gleaming white rusticated pavilions by Kent, as I say, without Burlington. An echo of Holkham. Under your feet, these stones - material reserved for the Trooping of the Colour. Her Majesty’s gravel. All yours.

 

Once, momentarily, it was swept with sand, as if the very Calanshio Sand Seas had invaded, to host bikini’d nymphettes.

 

On such gravelled spaces have Londoners disported since earliest times .... the Roman Public Forum of the first settlement around AD 50 and later amphitheatre of AD 70-80 were both gravel surfaces (see → 10.City 2)

 

The area of Tower Hamlets, Limehouse and Bow rests upon a separate strip of gravel, one of the Flood Plain gravels which were created at the time of the last glacial eruption some 15,000 years ago ....

 

And over such sands have postcards flown.

 

Less apparent than the just-mentioned ruddy extension, the Old Admiralty (or ‘The Admiralty’ or ‘Ripley Building’ – after the architect) is a modest E-shaped residence, well protected from the traffic by Adam’s Admiralty Screen itself inspired by Diocletian’s Palace at Spalato (you see, there is a connection) the first ever colonnade, according to none other than Gibbon. Admiralty House by Pepys’s descendant, S.P. Cockerell, completes what is fast becoming a boorish subject.

 

It really is time to get off this thoroughfare and find some elbow room. We’ve been on our feet for ages. Time for a break. Time to join the men in raincoats and trilbies. Take a walk over the footbridge where Ross and Dalby paced with military precision, trading enigmatic glances, with only the geese and coote to eavesdrop. We take our place, Buck House's standard signalling all is well, glint of the Victoria through the stirring willows, Scott's belvedere aloft, the roar of traffic subdued to a gentle hum, gravel and paving forsaken for grass and shade, in which to stretch, unwrap a sandwich, open the flask, lie down, head resting on the briefcase. Or rolled umbrella.  

 

A rectangle of dry grass is all I ask, Green Park say, my jacket rolled in makeshift pillow, hat or knotted handkerchief to shield the sun and ward off tree-sap. With the clouds opening and reconfiguring, just perceptibly, revealing just enough sun to force the eyelids shut, one could be anywhere. In the dancing Kandinsky patterns of the retina, the old postcard of Trooping the Colour flashes before me, the myriad of busbies like endless match-heads on a ground of red and navy blue, the impervious bereted figure side-saddle. ‘1964’, the franked / faded postmark.

 

 

Footnote

For this whole chapter, see: Colin Brown: Whitehall: The Street that Shaped a Nation – Pocket Books, 2010 (first publ. Simon & Schuster, 2009)