Andrew Ashdown
LONDON NOW:
An Oyssey Through the Nation's Capital
4 TRAFALGAR SQUARE
Before us now, the Great Square: the Capital’s centre piece, Forum, Piazza, Camp Santo (atoning for Whitehall). The single unchallenged place of congregation for the Metropolis, positioned at its very fulcrum, commanding all sides: The Strand, the Mall, Whitehall, the West End. The one window on London as a whole and the escape hatch where – at some point in their myriad peregrinations and ambits – all Londoners surface, from countless directions and haunts inconceivable, to breathe, find daylight, unwind, spread out. Idle, chatter, orate. March and gallivant.
£240? It should have a far higher rent in that beguiling board game.
Thus we have this hierarchy: from this perch is surveyed the whole Metropolis, no question; the views sweep to all corners, even across the river. A step below comes Piccadilly Circus, defining and giving form and shape to a territory more circumscribed, the West End, as does The Bank to the City, Elephant and Castle the south, Marble Arch north-west – and so on. Then, within, or below, conceptually, hierarchically speaking, are the sub-districts, with each its own focal point and escape hatch: Leicester Square for the 24-hour nocturnal light shows; Oxford Circus, high street chains and year-round sales; Waterloo Place, the clubs and smoking rooms, dens of privilege and intrigue; Seven Dials and Covent Garden, yet more consumer enchantment. The Mall for mass expressions of fealty, articulation of the collective gemütlich. To each its gathering place, its forum and rendezvous. And, above them all, with a purview of the entirety, this unique, formally expressive space, with its terraces and fountains, Empire-inveighing architecture, statues upon plinths, congenial balustrades and steps. Here is Charing Cross, the cabbies’ reference point; equestrian Charles I with a plaque to mark the ‘true’ centre; Admiralty Arch, greatest of all the capital’s assorted entrances (see below↓); St. Martin’s, parish church for the nation (as near as gets); London’s smallest police box (delight of tourist guides and books, in fact a broom cupboard); above all, Horatio, our Chief of Men (whatever Lady Antonia might think), surveying the scene imperiously. But we’ll come to the Great Man last as he is sort of omnipotent, up there on his pedestal, an inescapable presence.
Down at ground level the space is dominated by the elevated form of the National Gallery, all across one side, screening out the West End, the familiar frontage of pepper-pots and portico, thought generally if not unanimously to fall short of the site’s potential, its amorphous series of projections, over-subtle profiles, deflating the potential impact, diffusing and diluting matters while, for its part, the primary pepper pot evokes nothing so much as a skylight (of which there are a-plenty here). However, one must demur (mellowing with old age) and think the Lady much maligned. It is, after all, this very primness and good manners that are its strength: the modulation – and moderation - of forms at the flanks toward Admiralty Arch and St. Martin’s. Not inappropriately deferential, one must aver, reserving grandeur for the central point, via carefully graduated, intervening loggias, to the not altogether inconsiderable portico. Not, granted, UCL (→.10 Bloomsbury, also by Wilkins) but providing the vital appointments of a balcony and steps.
Also, the Gallery locates perfectly – backing into the shopping/entertainment/eating complex of dense street pattern which is the West End; facing onto the formal emblematic and symbolic manifestations of government .... embodying perfectly within itself something of both: tourist trap and government institution, national repository .... achieving (like those pavilions) a modulation of purpose, geography of use, as indeed is apparent all across the Metropolis, an evolving, eliding functionality – from Edgware and Paddington (cheap hotels and eateries, for fugitive travellers, birds of passage) to Mayfair (expensive, longer term) to Pall Mall (exclusive, long term) and the Palace itself.
Welcome then, habitual steps! Many a time have I waited here, peering into the crowd for a familiar face before recognition dawns and hands stretch out across the years; we swing about and join the throng, memories and experiences tumbling out in the repartee of shared anecdote, the doggerel of easy acquaintance attended with thumpings on the back and the overzealous entreaty; then, dissolution of belly-aching laughs and sighs - until it’s time to part, again:
I must down to the streets again, to the lonely, crowded life
And all I need is a fast train with the stations running by ....
And the green fields, and the grass banks and the wheels breaking
And a grey mist, and the dull sound of the engine shaking
I must down to ‘The Smoke’ again for the call of seductive shops
Is a wild call, and clear call, that cannot be denied!
And all I ask is an hour or two of my own, browsing
In the bookshops, and the clothes shops and Fortnum & Mason
I must down to the ‘National Gal’ and a cup of tea in the ‘cafe’
And all I ask if a place to sit with a plastic fork and ‘knafe’
And a clean loo, and a nice view from an open window
And the Van Eyck and Cartoon by Leonardo
It’s back home on the train again, to the lonely throng at Euston
And all I want is a quick escape to the train by the platform waiting
And the seat free, and the signal green and the carriage, lurching
And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream now the nightmare’s over.
Within, the Anrep mosaics in the floor ...and a pair of paintings which reflect those rivalries through time, you know:
Thomas Gainsborough vs. Joshua Reynolds
Sansovino vs. Palladio
(Giovanni) Bellini vs. Raphael
(Vincenzo) Bellini vs. Rossini.
Nelson vs. Wellington ....(or vs. Cromwell ....)
Chambers vs. Adam
Baker vs. Soane
The battle for street-names: ‘Waterloo’, ‘Trafalgar’ ‘Copenhagen’.
The pitting of Andrew Lambert against Richard Holmes, or Antonia Fraser .... or the devotees, latter day Puritans.
But I mean, of course, The Fighting Temeraire and The Haywain .... JMW Turner gave up architecture for painting. Blighted by the Napoleonic wars – a whole generation blighted - despite Horatio or the Duke. Failed architects: Hitler.... Ken Shearwood. The twin boys. Turner had been a pupil of Thomas Hardwick Jnr. (son of Thomas Hardwick and father of Philip ‘Euston Arch’ Hardwick). One of the twins then painted that mournful sunset while the other struggled with the mill pool.
Pairs are crucial. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The Walrus and the Carpenter.
And a third figure, Charles IV, trying to get in on the act. You know, it happened so often with those two boys. With Butch and Gemmell, Ali ....
Handel & Bach had the same birthday. The twins shared theirs with the Viscount.
Tacked on either side of the Gallery are, right, the subliminally placed National Portrait Gallery and left, Sainsbury Wing for which an earlier scheme drew the ire of the congenitally anxious royal dilettante. Yet, once again, restraint may have been the wisest course and preferable to the egotistical alternatives proposed. While not exactly adding much, it at least preserves - does not interfere - with what’s already there. Good manners, again, if you like. And all is not gloom: the internal stairways - in both galleries - are a bonus, taking us right to the top of the new galleries in the manner of the Beaubourg or Uffizi.
The Portrait Gallery’s Ondaatje Wing gives a déjà vu of the escalators all about (we’ve avoided so far) before stepping in to fleece us for a magnificent view down Whitehall. As to the portraits – a surfeit of visages best done quickly. I recommend the Tudors, Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth I, Thomas Cromwell and one or two of those you associate forever with their subjects: George IV, Wellington, Nelson, Byron (in Tartar dress). And then be depressed at the drop in standard moving into the twentieth century, reaching its fundament at the Beckham video. Still, Judie Dench ain’t bad; rescued many a situation in her time, of course.
But back to the arch - Admiralty Arch. Ah, yes. It is the largest in London, certainly, but rather an odd one. Not so much an arch, in the Parisian or Imperial Roman manner, as an office with arches inserted. Two for the price of one – or rather three - in the ‘Best of British’ tradition of compromise (as we saw at the Abbey →2.Westminster). Not the Arc du Triomphe. Well; we do ‘grand’, sometimes, but only abroad: Thiepval, Delhi, Mumbai. Hence no TGV, just Virgin – (see also irreverent remarks about Henry III, under Westminster Abbey (→ 2.Westminster) and Marble Arch (→ 24.Mayfair & Hyde Park).
Behind, in SPRING GARDENS, lurking, skulking in the shadows, are the British Council offices, refuge of the Diplomatic Service rejects, effete wannabe ‘bizniz’ types, ersatz politicians, marketeers, change managers, self-congratulatory pundits, consultants in general. By Howard V. Lobb, 1975, it has something of Powell and Moya or even Lasdun – attempted formality (stone or stone effect) undone by the irresistible imperative of modernity and contemporaneity – ‘with-itry’ - which bedevils our public institutions and quangos. Formerly the site of the controversy-sunk Metropolitan Board of Works – Italianate, 1858 by Frederick Marable, the Board’s Chief Architect[i]. No-one of note was interested, as the commission offered was paltry. Marable himself was a bore, according to The Elector 27 June 1857, "squeezing every word to death almost in a half-closed mouth, so that nobody scarcely knows what he says". Some things never change.
Directly across the Square is something rather less compromised, though by serendipity rather than design. St. Martin-in-the Fields, as I say, the nation’s parish church and a candidate for London’ finest, indeed, building of any type, impossible as that boast may sound. From so many standpoints: the perfect foil to the other buildings (albeit unwittingly), handing the torch of architectural progress from Palladio and Wren to Flitcroft and Soane, the template for countless facsimiles in white clapboard towns of New England, worshippers in bonnets and buckled hats – Puritans, Quakers, Mennonites, Moravians, Mormons, Amish ..... shows put on for the tourists, but then, what difference, in the land where much amounts to little more than film set, vicarious, heritage culture (also coming here, folks). Indian reservations / film-sets: what is film and what reality? Livelihoods made from recreating the past for Great Rail Journey Sid and Doris Bonkers.
It does have a slightly fake look about it. One has to do a double take and accept that this is the real thing – albeit an inventive reimagining of so many Greek or Roman exemplars filtered through Serlio, Scamozzi, Palladio, Fontana and all the rest. What is it about this configuration - of pediment, tower and spire - that so enthrals? It’s so elemental, crass even. Take a pedimented colonnade, in other words, classical portico, extend a box behind to provide space for worship; stick a bell tower on the top, toward the front, with a clock where it can be seen, a spire aloft and – hey presto! Why did no-one think of it before? Well, there is some art to all this: the convex sided steeple with its oculi, the way the cornice wraps around the clock faces, the extended side wings with porticos in antis ....
In antis. Mm – time for a lesson in classical vocabulary .. but who am I to preach? I’m struggling with this myself and would aver to others but there isn’t time, so let me instead direct you to John Summerson’s ‘The Classical Language of Architecture’ published by Thames & Hudson – beats so many more verbose and heavily illustrated works.
Truth is, posing as some sort of architectural pundit will never do. I’m making this up as I go along. Anybody could. And that is the point (as I expostulate to the man who asks the way to Seven Dials and knows as much as I).
In fact, this could all be Wren but for the eponymous ‘Gibbs’ window surrounds and the solecism of the tower appearing to rise from the roof. Inside, all is elliptical, curving Italian plasterwork, arcing from those blocked entablatures, with the bizarre internal windows (‘theatre box’ to one) guying the altar. Authentic galleries and triumphant organ loft.
The refined Corinthian capitals have a specific genesis – the Temple of Jupiter Stator (now ‘Castor & Pollux’). Gibbs worked with Carlo Fontana. The church represents a return to more sober English forms after the Italian Baroque St. Mary le Strand. St Giles in the Fields was a watered down version of this, Flitcroft being a pupil of either Gibbs or Burlington (depends who you ask). Some see the steeple sitting on the pediment as incongruous.
The place has been given a bit of a new lease of life by Eric Parry, clearing up and aerating the ancillary buildings, with a cafe made splendid by the crypt’s brick vaults. At the rear, a plinth offers a close up of the Venetian window melting to memorialise the Great Fire. Possibly.
To sum up. In all, a crude solution yet one that works. If you stare too long the illusion starts to wear off, the scheme to fall apart, like a mirage. Like a film you’ve seen too many times, whose script you can recite and realise makes no sense. Clumsy, almost patronising. A tower, a spire, a triangular portico stuck on, a box aft. And yet... There’s the rub. That is precisely why it is so successful. A long way from St. Mary-le-Strand or the Fellows’ Building, indeed. Hard to believe this is the same architect who would conjure the Gothic Temple at Stowe, thus inspiring Scott’s St. Pancras! (we’ll come to that anon →15.Camden). By then whimsy and romance had filled the air, beginning, arguably, with Vanbrugh’s beloved ‘castle air’ and furnishing, via Gothick folly Strawberry Hill, the entire Gothic Revival.
All this can be seen from the roof bar of the London Coliseum (see also → 17.Covent Garden) whose Globe supported by Atlas once more twirls above St. Martin’s Lane.
Handel again. His sculptor Roubiliac (in the V&A → 27.S.Kensington) may have met at Slaughter's Coffee House in St Martin's Lane to gossip and discuss scores engraved by Gravelot, friend of Hogarth, the most famous patron there.
And also nearby – Chandos Place
Before we go. Nelson’s Column. We come to it. It’s loftiness puts the humble Viscount ahead of all the heroes of yesteryear, trumping Wellington and Churchill, Drake and Raleigh, Cook and Livingstone, Alfred the Great and Elizabeth. He stands aloft, supported by a mooring bollard or capstan (serving in lieu of a misericord), his Admirals’ uniform - lanyards and epaulettes, tricorn and scabbard, all apparent - a beady eye crudely formed for our distant view, atop the column of fluted granite, 145 feet high (surpassed only by The Monument), rising from its pedestal with bronze bas-reliefs of St. Vincent, the Nile, Copenhagen and Trafalgar, all cast from captured guns. Below, Landseer’s docile lions have also each their own pedestal. They proved unpopular but Landseer eventually joined Nelson in St. Paul’s.
Pedestals, plinths, mesas ... this is the place for them. The Fourth Plinth invites its prey. Latter day St. Simeon Stylites (source, some say, of the minaret form). Raskolnikov standing on a square yard of space.
Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or think, an hour before his death,
that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and
the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to
remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to
live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!...How true it is!
Good God, how true! Man is a vile creature! ... And vile is he who calls him vile for that."
Or David Blaine, 'Vertigo'.
Nelson sees all – albeit in monovision. One of an inescapable, inseprable duo with Wellington - a third figure (Charles IV) trying to get in on the act.
The loneliness - Alas Poor Yorick, I knew him ...
Horatio eyes the crowds, the pools and fountains, the cavalcade of architecture: Saint Martin’s, National Gallery, Canada and South Africa Houses, Admiralty Arch and the well-behaved Office-cum-retail development of Northumberland Avenue in harmony with F. & H. Francis’s Trafalgar Buildings, Aitchison’s late Italianate Drummond’s Bank, Blomfield’s similarly Italian corner pavilion Offices and the tucked away Franco-Flemish confection of tourelles, pepperbox-roof, stained glass and mullioned window which is 20 Cockspur Street by William Woodward - and we should keep an eye for Webb’s Grand Trunk Railway offices rising above and Bolton’s Hamburg-America Line beyond. Nelson, as I say, beholding with that overworked eye, a view that takes in all the compass points – east toward the City by way of The Strand and beckoning dome of St. Pauls; north to the shops and theatreland; west along the Mall to the Palace; south through Whitehall to the bastions of government and Parliament. The Embankment’s calm on one side, bustle of Piccadilly the other; between them, the Parks, St. James, Green and Hyde – all in sight. Here are enacted the nation’s great occasions: royal jubilees, carnivals, New Year’s Eve frolics, Trooping the Colour, Remembrance Day ceremonial and anti-war protests. All. Within this compass sit both Sovereign and Parliament, executive and judiciary - the Church; even the Fourth Estate is within range of the mariner’s telescope.
We head there now, into the Strand. The City beckons.