Andrew Ashdown

LONDON NOW: An Odyssey Through the Nation's Capital

 

8. The City 1

 

So, we enter – the heart of the matter, the jumbled towers and spires, the livery halls, churches and seats of commerce, the counting houses ....Bashford’s Land of Eldorado, Byron’s ‘mighty mass of brick, and smoke, and shipping ... dirty and dusty, but as wide as eye could reach’

 

From afar, an unpropitious pile, an indeterminate, opaque density of unpropitious angular forms, lacking the sublime, overwhelming vertical mass of Manhattan, the venerability and familiarity of La Serenissima, the beguiling towers of San Giminiano or the boulevarded perspectives of Paris, a condensed muddle as inviting as Frankfurt or Birmingham, save for that one single domed eminence which we have already surveyed at length but now in all directions outbid in the vertical stakes among this serrated, blocky mass of elided, countervailing forms rising to the collision of the indistinguishable prominences, Tower 42 and Heron. Relief comes from the latter-day Scott’s fluke of the Gherkin which is thus handed the palm.

 

But below all this, at street level, lies the secret. Come down from these hubristic heights and there’s nowhere like the City. Every block yields a new vista unknown to the unremitting skyscraper canyons of New York even (with much vaunted Greenwich Village). Churches, livery halls, turn of the century imperial banking halls, inveigling passageways, arcades, courts, yards, coffee houses, tea rooms, time-honoured emporia for bespoke suits, hats, umbrellas, club ties or tobacco – every pavement every curb and corner is redolent with tradition and – for those numb to that subject – an immediate unmistakable and palpable atmosphere, an kind of aesthetic intrigue.

 

And the City is pristine; it’s a clean machine, of gleaming non-abrasively treated Portland stone and shining steel, aluminium and glare-resistant, non-reflective, environmentally proficient glass and polychromatic polymer fascia, devoid of the clutter and detritus of tourism which for long has besmirched the West End - the gambling shops and, pawnbrokers, ‘top-shelf’ or ‘under-the-counter’ ‘newsagents’, off-licenses, betting shops, bargain basements, take-aways and charity shops (purveyors of candles, ‘crafted’ frames and beads and other essentials) that proliferate Oxford Street, free of the provincial shoppers headed in their lemming-like charge for the High Street brands facsimiled in Birmingham or Manchester, the obedient habitués of burger and pasta houses, perched precariously on stools to imbibe from Styrofoam their exorbitant black effluent that goes in the name of coffee, content to accept their anodyne and cheerless surroundings, to acknowledge the disingenuity of sterile salutation repeated mechanically by the reluctant youthful, zero-contract hires of the global beverage chains, tiptoeing over discarded refuse and laughing off the invective of bus drivers without change, taxi drivers without maps and the dead visages in search of consumer goods whose gullible, design label obsession is are gleefully met by the purveyors of shoes or sweets packaged as if they were Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh.

 

The City too is condensed – tiny – a thousand buildings of major corporations condense the architectural interest of a whole metropolis in any other country, and this cheek-by-jowl proximity – physical, visceral– has odd and unforeseen effects for, thanks to the dynamic arrangement – eschewing the grid of Milton Keynes and American cities – the vistas come in all directions: as you break into one street another opens up, a view suddenly appears. Coming down Gresham Street to Cheapside or Poultry, there suddenly is the Bank and, ahead, St. Stephens. You’re never far from anywhere on the same principal as the Bentham panopticon or (come to think of it) – the human brain itself, actually - in others words, the proximity is not just topographical yet, of course, the circularity of the City’s layout makes it effectively smaller still than the constraint of one square mile. This pattern of infinite connectivity makes operates not merely as a hub of the financial world but, at a more tangible, prosaic level, the spokes radiate across the metropolis - from the Bank - the hub within the hub. And from The Temple to St. Pauls to the Gherkin, the City too, embraces the circular, cylindrical or domical form.

 

This palpable density means that the City must dispense with all the peripheral and superfluous: the crush of high-income estate and physical immensity crushes out the ephemeral. Hence the pristine quality, devoid of bookmakers, electricity showrooms, souvenir shops, film theatres, night-clubs, 24 hour foodmarts and the whole vast array of grot that smears the West End and all up west. Free of the detritus of the throbbing mobs of provincial shoppers, school parties, trivia tourists, nocturnal clubbers, bingers, bored weekenders, hotel break Travelodgers, flight stop-over desynchronisis, oriental sales twitchers, maniacs – itinerants all - gone. Indeed, since Big Bang, the stockbrokers, traders, runners, touts likewise. Replaced by the neat purposeful gait of the (often T-shirted) city financier, the mousy shuffle of the church-crawler or churchwarden (more churches per square mile than anywhere in Europe outside Rome).

 

True, there is an insinuation, a drip, drip, drip of the infection seeping into the Square Mile but only so much as makes the place convenient and tolerable to the wanderers, those beyond redemption, terminally susceptible to West End inducements (from Birmingham, Manchester – fundament of emptiness, Milton Keynes). Still the prevailing idiom is of pinstriped suits and pinstriped buildings, the well contoured and amenitised financial types, brokers, bankers and biznizmen. The City has order, discretion, conformity. Less clutter, less rubbish, less distraction and blandishment - time to take in the details of street furniture and architecture, from bollards and iron grilles to rusticated plinths and moulded doorways, niched sculpture, antique lamp standards, port cocheres and canopies, ironmongery, seating, statuary and memorials, gardens and sequestered spaces, courts and sudden vistas. And all those fifty or so churches, from abandoned towers and tiny boxes tucked out of sight to mighty St. Mary le Bow and St. Sepulchre Newgate, ancient St. Bartholomew, add to which the thirty-five livery halls, from the secreted and modest delight of Ironmongers to the grandiloquence of Goldsmiths and Fishmongers, climaxing in the Guildhall itself. And so to the summit, the throbbing heart of it all, that Edwardian Acropolis which is the Bank, Royal Exchange and Mansion House – the symbolic centre of the City if not its only pulse.

 

Let us go then ....

 

 

8a. St. Paul’s to the Guildhall

 

Is there any vector more enticing, any route in its contemplation thereof more uplifting, any ambulatory excursion more inveigling than leaving St. Paul’s Churchyard and heading along Cheapside – imagining the shops, the high street of old, imagining the crammed trays and baskets, the half-timbered shop-fronts, the clichéd butcher, baker and .... head toward The City?

 

The commanding steeple of St. Mary-le-Bow , like an old familiar face in the crowd at ‘Arrivals’, hails us and – whether on the street or up in the air (of the mind’s eye, surveying Bing Maps, Google Earth) – we feel blessed and in every way obliged to enter and seek solace.

 

But before that, a nod to the modern developments hereabout. New Change and the glass lift to the terrace furnish another 'apsidal' view but then we reach thr top and look straight across on the level while all about the City comes, at alst, properly into view, including, close at hand, St. Nicholas Cole Abbey (concave leaded steeple), Bracken House, St. Augustine Watling Street & St. Paul’s Choir School, St. James Garlickhythe; further off, the Old Bailey and, beyond the City limits, The Shard, The Eye, even Southwark Cathedral. The top of St. Mary le Bow looks incongruous, cut off by the roof of the cocktail bar. Sunset in the metropolis was never better.

 

But all these labels seem superfluous for the jumble of blocky, spiked, domed, mansarded, angular, prodding, mute forms ....  We descend to ...

 

Bow Bells House, 2007 by David Walker (in association with HOK) - Portland stone , glass curtain, vast expanses, as is the mode – and radiator fins for textural contrast - yet the white and glass idiom, crisp lines and pronounced rooftop are didactically, artfully evocative of the ‘50s, of course, while the glass-stone juxtaposition continue the miscegenous trend of Pelli’s WFC NY ... and other ‘80s models.

 

And so to all these churches of Wren. One can’t escape the feeling, the sense that, after the Fire, the wasps came in and rapidly rebuilt their nests – all these papery, light, fragile, thin flexible, organic, complex whited sepulchres with their elliptical, tented skeins of roof and vaulted space, their arches, pendentives and exedras - always the whiteness, thinness - Portland stone, plaster and paint – light, hymenopteric, papery, brittle stuff - organically formed and applied at will - squinches and pendentives (themselves like swallows’ nests) like the muqanas and mocárabes of Moghul Moorish Ottoman, or Andalusian Maghrebi architecture ...

 

The ornamental detail of amphorae, urns and putti, though classical in origin, could also be from .... Egypt, Mesopotamia ... Chola.

 

In these tight plots, the lack of space to realise the full conventional cruciform plan – hence the elision, suggestion or implication of spaces, forms: aisles, chapels, transepts. Also, some satisfaction must have been derived – sense of accomplishment - from playing this game. But was that what they really wanted? To recreate the layout of a medieval church? The theological context – Puritanism, the Bible, Prayer Book churches – had changed everything; all emphasis was on the lectern and pulpit – clarity is all, not just physically – the clutter removed, figures and imagery banished, all excess expunged – engendering a milieu – idiom, sensibility – of clarity, an atmosphere of quasi scientific inquiry - clear space within whose perspective lines the deductive mind can contemplate the spiritual dimension. The Royal Society’s Hooke and Wren, magnified drawings inspired by the architectural plates of Palladio, Vitruvius, Serlio (Gibbs did his own); the light of reason illuminating the darkness of medieval benighted superstition to elucidate and reveal the truth of creation - a cerebral, intellectually engaging if still ultimately inexplicable belief. In the end there is a line .... even then.

 

And the ‘immortal splendour’ of these places? What of that? When you look at St. Magnus or St. Mary Abchurch, ironic that what were intended as Puritan – if not Puritan then at least Prayer Book – are so rich as to now be the bastions of the recalcitrant ‘bitter-enders’ in their laager, I mean the Anglo-Catholics, the bells and incense brigade, processing London Bridge to throw their wooden sacrificial cross after Roman coins and tales of Old Mithras ....

 

Is it that we are so unused to opulence (after the cleansing ‘50s) that almost any ornament seems extravagant? Has our aesthetic sensibility so purified as to be nauseated by the merest trifle - the faintest indication of caryatid or acanthus leaf? Or - is it that these churches simply acquired their ornamental largesse subsequently, accreted in the manner of barnacles, much as the Cistercian houses had in the C14th? Or again, was it just that, under Charles II, the motto was no longer austerity but, while eschewing idolatry and ritual, appreciating beauty, albeit in the new language of the Renaissance?

 

You look at these churches – not just Wren’s – but all the City churches – and you face a difficulty. You look at these layers, the baffling fiendishly complex re-orderings, additions, product of repeated wanton destruction and miraculous resurrection, of ardent overhaul and refurbishment, reinterpretation and re-imagining in response to changes in taste and use and credo, from the Saxons to the Normans, to Lateran III and the Sarum Rite, to the French attachment of Edward I, Henry III, the Savoyards, cult of the Virgin Mary. And then the Reformation, the Marian Restitution and Edward III, the Elizabethan compromise, the Puritans, Laud, Cromwell and back to Charles - crisis, trauma, war, blitz, earthquake, fire and pestilence, in response to the decline in communicants, attendance and, finally, the complete loss of faith - to unpick decipher – this is of course the case with any church of a certain age (most are) the whole business of unpeeling the layers which is clearly explained by Cunnington and fiercely adjudicated by Sharpe in particular, while the story of sudden switchbacks in change of taste and use was never better elucidated than by Eamonn Duffy[iii] or charmingly by Sir Roy Strong.

 

Well, here you face, not so much the medieval archaeology – though there is plenty of that lurking about, hidden away – but the layers imposed by the many hands that followed Wren.

 

Consider if you will an imaginary spectrum, at one end the complete pristine Wren church with all its contemporary fittings – by Gibbons, Tijou, and Thornton and so on - intact – at least as theoretical parameter (since this cannot exist) - at the other, the completely eviscerated church attested only by a plaque ‘X marks the spot’, perhaps in a pavement slab or a wall, even worse, divorced from the earth in some lonely corridor of a ghastly office block .... Well, forget, thank God, that nightmare – these are merely the end points for the residue of what lies between – buildings in so many different states of preservation, authenticity and completeness as to defy summation – Wiki has done a good job:

 

churches that have survived largely as built  11

survived but substantially altered before the Blitz 1

substantially rebuilt after the Blitz to match original 9

damaged after World War II and rebuilt 1

re-ordered for new use 1

only the tower remaining 6

moved 2

demolished due to the Union of Benefices Act 10

demolished for other reasons 9 

 

50 altogether, 51 with St. Paul’s, of which 29 substantive.

 

Looking at all the churches within the City, there were 111 in the 16th century; 80 were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666 and of these 51 were subsequently rebuilt by Wren. When Betjeman wrote in 1974 he said there had been 97 before the Fire and at the time of writing 38 had survived. The number after the fire had been 75 with the story of steady decline already apparent – demolished as the population of the City of London declined - down to 49 before the Blitz, 26 after. By the late ‘60s we were back up at 39. Excluding St. Paul’s Cathedral, Wiki makes it 29 that have survived in some form or another – to which I add All-Hallows-the-Great, still visible as a ruin. Some are towers, others have strange new purposes.

 

So, now, begin with St. Mary-le-Bow. The complex tower – the lightwight rotunda then what? Openwork, skeletal dome or volutes (as Pevsner has it)? Then a classical temple with re-entrant angles to the pediment, more volutes to the final obelisk steeple

From the tower entrance, you have to traverse a narthex or vestibule to reach it, the church proper. Here I found a confab of in progress – among them, a priest loudest - killing the atmosphere and dispelling all sense sacred. It was not aided by the poor lighting and general lack of care apparent (when compared, for example, to St. Stephen, Walbrook (coming up →). Nor is it as large as I’d expected. Certainly, it’s more impressive from without, with the church body so far from the streetside tower (Wren making use of Roman foundation). The sun catches the tower’s elevated rotunda and steeple - the sheer viscerality of deeply modelled stonework high in the air recalls Christchurch Newgate. So, altogether passes muster, magnifique, if a little garish inside and we have the Wren tower with its ‘bows’.

 

107 Cheapside is here – a retained facade (we’re retaining 1950s facades now!) and rear extension (as it were by stealth), John Robertson 2009.

 

Somewhere here, near what was Friday Street, stood the Eleanor Cross with Greek Cross atop – placed at the orders of Edward I (as we saw at Charing Cross → 5.Strand). It was rebuilt in 1486 and regilded for several coronations thereafter until being finally demolished by the Puritans in 1643.

 

Here too stood humble 'St. Peter Cheap' annihilated in the Great Fire and St. Matthew Friday Street demolished in 1885 – neither rebuilt.

 

Stepping out onto the pavement (another example: Carpenters Hall on London Wall → 10.City 2) but mostly along King Street, the former Atlas Assurance now Barclays Bank – Thomas Hopper 1834-6 – in ‘the grandest Italian manner’[vi] with a kind of rebus halfway up in the Atlas and Globe of Farmer & Brindley (see also No.1 Cornhill below ↓ and the London Coliseum → 17.Covent Garden). Next door – some kind of echo of Lutyens’ Midland Bank.

 

Mercers Hall, Ironmonger Lane, Noel Clifton of Gunton & Gunton 1954-58, of limited architectural interest being dismissed by Pevsner himself (via Simon Bradley) as ‘big, pretentious and wholly conventional’; however, lest we forget, the premier livery company (incorporated 1394 but older) and they own the Mansion House and a whole lot else. City Merchants, one-eyed, in the pack for Madame Sosostris.

 

I am a young executive.

No cuffs than mine are cleaner;

I have a Slimline brief-case and

I use the firm's Cortina.

 

St. Olave, Jewry or ‘Old Jewry’ – up Ironmonger Lane and into St. Olave's. A sad sight, just the tower and west wall to an office development. The tower of 80 feet projects from the west front, four storied (three main divisions – four windows and a clock) and square and, uniquely for Wren, battered i.e. with a barely detectable canting inward, topped by obelisk pinnacles. Most poignant the segmental pedimented doorway to what was the church, aisled, as the external bays imply. Now nowhere. Like the plaques outside the Forum in Rome, conjuring what was there: windows that animate as in Hogwarts. The snap-in-a-box idea. The whole Platform 9¾ jibe.

 

The Guildhall

At the top of King Street, cut through to ensure escape should there be another conflagration, lies what , I hereby confess, I have only recently explored. You find me out! But then, what did you expect, dear, reader (to be shaken by the wind?) That I was some kind of obsessive who has visited every single building in London, tramped the streets through summer and winter, abandoning wife, family, career and leisure in the hope of some kind of remuneration? There are indeed such people – I do use Twitter. But I am, after all (and this is the point) just like you (imagine it!) - a layman, a dilettante, observer, passenger, tourist, amateur enthusiast. An Autolycus. So, you too can do this. That is the point. That really is the point.

 

Once again, I am congenitally influenced by the Ladybird Book of London – recently regained via Amazon. All Hail the independent seller! Nevertheless, I want to rage against the corporate cancer taking hold, this time of a building of national historic and architectural importance, hijacked, like so much of our heritage, by the suits and bizniz execs, hived off for corporate self-indulgence and excess which purportedly ‘creates wealth’ but is no more than commercially-articulated flatulence. The loss of the great hammer-beam in WWII is felt and no amount of re-imagining or make-over can compensate. The remodelled exterior with its odd stubby lancets – ‘Hindoo’ shenanigans by George Dance the Younger - has become singular and characteristic, along with the soaring flêche above.

 

The Old Library was G. Scott while the two new bits – the Spence-style Clock Museum, &c., and the PO-MO Art Gallery, are Sir George Gilbert Scott Jnr.

 

The Crypts are both aisled and have the oldest and among the finest stone vaults in London – Croxton’s East Crypt of 1411 with Purbeck shafted columns and chamfered ribs and the earlier, plainer - perhaps 1330s - West Crypt.

 

GUILDHALL YARD

The 100 x 80m outline of the Amphitheatre of 70-80 A.D. is traced in Guildhall Yard; it accommodated around 8000 spectators.

 

Behind Here Woolgate House, Siddell Gibson Architects, 1997-2002, with columns bearing Egyptian capitals replacing the Victorian Wool Exchange (demolished 1962) which had a Turkish bath 

 

As we leave: St. Lawrence Jewry, This now closes the court of the Guildhall and makes singular impact with a north aisle and splendid east front J&W attribute to the Great Model – two enormous round-headed windows interleaved with three blank window surrounds of the same size and shape but inset with niches - a clever twist on the Palladian or Serlian Motif – with swags and festoons, all separated by attached unfluted Corinthian columns, pilasters at the corners. The tower west a rather confusing series of step changes from square to aedicules to spire – this end was not meant to be seen (Betjeman). The triumph of the interior is lightness despite the dark pews - the ceiling a grid of white and gilded cornices and frets à la Banqueting House. The steeple fibre-glass (similar conceits at The Abbey → 2.Westminster).

 

20 King Street My fellow Tweep ‘Ludgate Larry’ commented that the sculptor carved ‘N’ as ‘И’. The building is 1850, Sancton Wood (the architect of Irish and other railway stations), Italianate, of Portland stone. Entrance on canted corner, 2 storey, mullioned bow above. Doric columns support stilted segmental arches. Modillion cornice.

 

We’re north of the citadel. There, flush with the canyon walls, St. Margaret, Lothbury packed in tight among the banks (one a nice Italianate job), the street running east-west here so the whole building runs with it and the entrance is thus side-on, taking you directly under the tower, itself a simple cubic form topped by a lead steeple. Within, furnishings from St. Olave Jewry and screen from All-Hallows-the-Great.

 

13-15 Moorgate (on the corner of Kings Arms Yard) by ) 1890-93, Aston Webb & Ingress Bell, a busy corner turret with ‘spiky spirelet’[i] projecting oriel-style with those pendants you see on the way into the Chapter House at York Minster. The building is otherwise remarkably grid-like. Built as the Metropolitan Life Assurance HQ, now Europe Arab Bank.

 

The BANK

Collect £200 Salary as you Pass Go.

Nowadays that’s rated as £200m salary. As we saw, the City is condensed – you are never ever far from anywhere, the spoked layout makes of all the City a hub and not just the crossing point at Bank – so that the Bank then becomes the hub within the hub, the ultimate nexus point.

 

We should have begun here – were it not for the need to perambulate - for this is the centre of gravity, the essence (though clearly not ‘soul’) as is Eros to the West End and Big Ben to Westminster (with all due respect to Horatio). Nonetheless, for you dear reader, we have navigated and trodden a walkable route and so come to it now.

 

Soane’s Bank was of course the City’s masterpiece, the one exception to the blight of the Napoleonic Wars[ii] with the original idea of several banking halls and the use of the order from Temple of Vesta at Tivoli – hence ‘Tivoli Corner’ - so much like St. Paul’s apsidal ends.

 

All that remains are the shallow domed banking halls and surrounding rusticated base, or plinth, fortress-like, including said Tivoli Corner (n.b. the suave domes on pendentives were the idea , according to Pevsner, of Robert Taylor in his earlier work at the Bank and then George Dance Junior at the Guildhall Council Chamber (↓ below) though somewhat improved upon).

 

The Ziggurat principle reigns, with pompous elevated portico of coupled columns - another St. Paul’s reference but this time from Herbert Baker, the man who destroyed most of Soane’s work in his expansion and overhaul. One is in accord with Jones & Woodward (and Pevsner) on this: Baker undoubtedly committed an act of vandalism. I’m normally a fan of Baker’s. Not only did he do my alma mater – based on Jefferson’s University of Virginia but, let’s not forget, the magnificent Union Buildings in Pretoria (where Mandela was sworn in as President), the EAR&H Railway Headquarters in Nairobi and .... so much else. The Secretariat in New Delhi.

 

Aye, and there’s the rub. The dispute with Lutyens. Lutyens brought Baker into the capital project and assigned him these two buildings facing each other across the ‘Rajpath’ or ceremonial boulevard leading up to Lutyens’ Viceroy’s House (Rashtrapati Bhavan). Baker wanted a level plateau between his two buildings which in turn necessitated a steep gradient for the central axis, blocking the view of Lutyens’ masterpiece. The ensuing row soured relations for two decades.

 

Does one see a precedent here? Was it a case of jealousy?

 

The child breaking his enemy’s toys? Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

 

To quote Bradley – it wasn’t (as Baker perceived) a difference of taste that separated him from Soane but the gulf between talented professionalism and imaginative genius[vi]. Ditto Lutyens. In fact, I’m sure I’m not alone in having really got to know Baker only via Lutyens and, while the Secretariat Buildings are splendid they do not possess the spark of genius of the Rashtrapati Bhavan.

 

One has to put Lutyens out of mind when evaluating Baker (or anyone else, come to that). Consider the Union Buildings. And the Bank itself is not such a bad job. After all, what else could Baker have done? The brief was to expand – which he did, upwards, keeping Soane’s perimeter wall. The twin projections on Lothbury are very characteristic, of course (Delhi - and one cannot avoid Ange-Jacques Gabriel at Place de la Concorde) – the whole thing sort of works. And he opened up Tivoli Corner.

 

The mind travels - away from the sad story of the Bank (and Soane .... Tyringham ...) to Baker’s fine white stucco colonnades still grace the hill along what was Sclater’s Road on the way to the Rift Valley, with the bell (on one occasion painted red by the boys) tolling the quarters from its classical belfry. Inside those colonnades Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) begged the Governor (Leslie Philips) to ‘smell the coffee’. And we would parade on Friday mornings while the band belted out ‘Colonel Bogey’ and ‘Ship Ahoy!’... I don’t know whether tis so today....

 

London’s perennial pavement of mosaic resurfaces in the Roman townhouse floors on display here and in the BM (→ 16.Bloomsbury) .

 

The Royal Exchange, now in private commercial hands, alas! Tite’s rebuild of Sir Thomas Gresham’s pioneering bourse was, if nothing else, the final piece in the jigsaw of grand, venerable, business-like buildings that here make of the City a worthy architectural counterweight to the West End – a meeting of grand corners comparable to Trafalgar Square or Piccadilly Circus but, in its assembling of architectural tours de force - Bank, Royal Exchange, Royal Insurance (the dome), St. Mary Woolnoth, Mansion House, the often overlooked Italianate Magistrates Court and, finally, National Provincial Bank – surpassing those, a Victorian Acropolis equalled only by Birmingham in its Victorian heyday (Council House, Library, Museum & Art Gallery, School of Art, Mason Science College, Chamberlain Memorial, Christ Church and, of course, the Town Hall modelled on the Temple of Castor and Pollux). Well, back to the Exchange – the atrium, once open, now renovated by Fitzroy Robinson (they of Ashdown House) now a glassy forum a la mode. The murals recall nothing so much as my Ladybird Book of Kings and Queens of England. Out front, the welcoming churchlike plinth, a rare vantage point at which to comprehend the City along with, out back, Royal Exchange Buildings with statues to Reuters and Peabody. Above, the weather vane with the grasshopper.

 

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)

 

You do wonder how the City otherwise escaped the depredations of Fitzroy Robinson – well, not quite – there’s a couple coming up (immediately and then 10 Queen Street Place and Banque de Paris) and later on, 200 Aldersgate Street(→ 10.City 2) - their ‘70s trio of crème et brun in Manchester, Birmingham and Newcastle (this latter now eviscerated), talismanic brutalism realised in a kind of kitsch luxuriance of cream travertine (or granite) and bronze not quite masking the merciless concrete, an aesthetic best described as cappuccino or bouffant, from the openings and supports to the intentionally jarring juxtaposition of slabs: low and bulky vs. high and ... bulky - all in this jaded tiramisu, the mud brown plastic trim of ‘The Sweeney’, Ford Granada or Cortina – machine-knitted tank top.

 

We could now go across to St. Michael Cornhill via various passageways , but will return anon (→ ‘10.The City 2).

 

Fitzroy-Robinson’s involvement is harder to pinpoint at the Former Stock Exchange, or, as now, 125 Old Broad Street where they were executive architects with Joseph F. Milton Cashmore & Partners. The design was Llewellyn Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Walker & Bor , a classic Brutalist soot-attracting concrete which Grimshaw replaced with greenish glass. And so, you know, the marketing department always get their way - a change of colour and logo justifies their ephemeral, fugitive existence. More floor space was admittedly added in the process. An enthusiast (and ‘Official London Guide’) has blogged a fascinating if slightly nerdish record of the transformation, the concrete peeling off from top down.

 

Of course, this is to forget the series of still older and Former Stock Exchanges: that of 1801-02 by James Peacock, 1853-4 by Thomas Allason and 1882-88 by J.J. Cole[iii]. The former Stocks Market is quite another story.

 

n.b. (↔) Drapers Hall can be seen here

 

60 Threadneedle Street As part of all this redevelopment, Eric Parry added this, a 2009 award winner (which award, the mince-pie award Rod Gilbert faced at Knutsford?). Its black swirling horizontals recall Erich Mendelssohn - or perhaps a ‘midnight blue’ version of Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie, Scott Store in Chicago.

 

Pause at 51 Threadneedle Street The National Westminster Bank, 1922-31 & 1936, Mewès & Davis, the camber Palazzo Massimi, the rest Farnese then Royal Insurance, No.1 Cornhill – opposite the Bank - by J Macvicar Anderson, 1905, with banded rustication[vi], Greek key string course, scrolled pediment with maidens and globe, and a dome to echo all those domes opposite, a reference point between the Mansion House and -

 

St. Mary Woolnoth

 

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

 

Set back deeply from the other thrusting edifices of the hub, another Hawksmoor tour de force – he never does things by half – the base engulfed in rustication, including the columns which are thereby rendered subliminal - lines whizzing away from the cavernous arched aperture which reappears – echoes rather - as a lunette above the cornice, still engulfed in rustication with grooves flying off at all angles before an immense divider of plain entablature – tabula rasa – holds aloft the upper storey, a mini temple of attached Corinthian columns and flat pediment, sideways-on but with the columns spaced so as to imply two towers which then break forth in the next stage. Against all of which the main mass of the church might appear inconsequential yet manages to prolong the tumult, the south side an array of niches rather than windows (to silence traffic), the frames deeply rusticated and fiercely moulded in monumental anticipation of Gibbs and his ‘surrounds’, inset with segmental entablatures on angled columns reminiscent of sections of the Maritime Theatre at Tivoli. The interior is surprisingly compact, ruthlessly rectangular, illuminated on all sides by the giant lunettes, the multiple fluted Corinthian columns declaring the Greek Key pattern on the underside of the entablature (soffit, intrados[viii]), the glitter and darkness of gold on limewood of twisted Solomonic columned reredos with the tablets of the word, gold lettering on vermilion ......

 

1-6 Lombard Street are the former offices of the Scottish Provident Institution by Dunn & Wilson 1905-08 assisted by W. Curtis Green and later renovated by JLW[ix] a gentle convex curve used to good effect (see also Unilever → 6.Holborn) deeply rusticated and, as so often for the Edwardian commercial hubris, the raised open colonnade (see BOX → 6.Bloomsbury).

 

The Mansion House is now a misnomer, of course, being a ‘venue’ rather than a mayoral dwelling. Externally, it fits the bill though after the twin belvederes were surgically removed it lost its castle air. Nests and arks are supposed to float but the Mayor and Noah failed to come to terms, it seems. Always - the duality, the fighting twins, Tweedledum, Tweedledee. Within, Dance the Elder’s grandeur appears decidedly shabby and second-rate against the glossy venues available for corporate knees-ups available now but the so-called Egyptian Hall, built during the Egyptian craze (see also Finsbury Bank for Savings → 11. Holborn & Clerkenwell) – derived from Vitruvius rather than actual sand-digging – as the coffered ceiling and classical details attest in Ionian white and gold – is not bad. Not bad.

 

City Magistrates Court, No.1 Queen Victoria Street, 1873-5, John Whichcord occupies its own island site (and quakes before the redevelopment of Bucklersbury House ↓) and is (as mentioned above ↑) easily overlooked. Italianate, by the architect of Temple Chambers (→ 6.Holborn). The former National Safe Deposit’s vaults had on occasion been redeployed as cells.

 

Just away from all this - hardly avoidable, in fact – is this confection of pink and brown striping with the unpropitious and non-committal moniker of No.1 Poultry – may one suggest ‘The Battenberg Cake’? Someone already has? Note, however, Kremer’s terracotta frieze.

 

It replaced wonderful Mansion House Buildings, home of Mappin & Web, with the conical roofed corner (‘Chinaman’s hat’[xii]) and clock, designed by the Belchers, 1870.

 

Jones & Woodward remark upon the extraordinary concatenation of famous architects at this intersection: Lutyens (Midland Bank), Soane (The Bank), Hawksmoor (St. Mary Woolnoth), Dance (Mansion House), Wren (St. Stephen Walbrook); and that’s leaving out Edwin Cooper (former National Provincial Bank, now Nat West) and William Tite (Royal Exchange). However, the idea of Mr. Stirling joining this pantheon fills one with modified rapture (if I may borrow Diarmaid MacCulloch’s unbeatable trademark phrase [xiii] ). J&W also mention the controversy surrounding the development, including, at one stage, proposals by SOM. Midland Bank, Poultry is Lutyens in fortress mode, the articulation of massive, tactile walling using proportioned, shallow setbacks, the kind of exercise in fastidious proportion and paring back of detail that had already reached its apotheosis at The Cenotaph. However, as at the Grosvenor House (→ 24.Mayfair), if a notch up, this is a cosmetic assignment, just the exterior and a couple of reception areas and halls, the rest by Gotch and Saunders of Kettering. Nonetheless, it’s more dignified than his ziggurat in Manchester but see also Britannic House, Finsbury Square (→10.City 2). Another small dome – there’s a few about here. A very tight corkscrew stairway here for servants, plummeting all the way down through the building

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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