Andrew Ashdown

LONDON NOW: An Odyssey Through the Nation's Capital

 

10. The City 2

 

 

10b. Liverpool Street to Holborn Circus – Along the Roman Wall

 

Nip into: St. Botolph-without-Bishopsgate first of the pair of churches crushed by Heron Tower (also All hallows London Wall, coming up) 1725-09 rebuilt James Gold & George Dance Senior. As Betjeman says, an ‘unencumbered site’ - a change from the norm, big brick two-storied box, pilastered, pedimented front (a blank portico of sorts) tower with rusticated base, then clock, bell-hole set between doubled pilasters (echoing the portico), cylinder top within a larger gauge cylindrical drum or parapet before the inverted vase or amphora and foliate pinnacle. A fine, white barrel-roofed interior.

 

Well, we’re here. As Victoria engulfed its domain so now too:

 

Liverpool Street Station

On the Board: £200 - today’s value: £1.5bn

 

A cathedral in all but name - and a Betjeman favourite, ogee pointed arches, Gothic detailing, cruciform plan. I do worse than quote Nicholas Taylor in the Bard’s ‘Pictorial History’, thus:

 

“an extremely competent cathedral of steam designed by the company’s engineer Edward Wilson. It has a strong division into naive, aisles transepts and choir, with coupled columns and pierced spandrels; sidewalls are of red and yellow brick. The footbridge runs across in exactly the position one would expect to find the rood-screen, and in place of the pulpit there are steps up to a first-floor buffet’. 

 

Alas! My diary entry 3rd September 2012:

 

"following the throng into one of those Birmingham type subterranean streets and suddenly one is in Liverpool Street. Very impressive – recently cleaned cream brick and dark blue & crimson ironwork, the shed just about appreciable beyond the ticket turnstiles but all somewhat spoilt by the cross-axial elevated walkway with outlets all along glassed in like a conservatory, blocking the view. Locate sign for ‘Central Line’ – and ‘Metropolitan & District’ provides my escape." 

 

The Bard himself:

 

“I know of no greater pleasure for elevenses in London than to sit in this tea place.”

 

Indeed. He also noted the capitals stripped of their ironwork leaves, perforated iron brackets still in place, saved from the ‘parsimony and arrogance of the old-fashioned with-it architects with their streamlining and other pseudo-simplicities, their ‘contemporary’ style’. Well, that at least is all back together now, if not the tea-place.

 

All more than can be said of Broad Street, its billowing roof and Venetian arched stairs gone, gone, gone, despite Sir Paul ’s encomium, along with the spirit of the place[ii]. Alongside is the Andaz (formerly Great Eastern) Hotel - Barry, Charles Jnr & E.M., with the secreted Masonic Temple no longer secluded but available for hire, another venue with olde worlde charm and character. We leave its beautifully cleaned orange brickwork with those giant consoles or modillions (q.v. Chiswick Town Hall).

 

We come to Bishop’s Square – a magnanimous benefaction in this part of the City, Foster’s multiple blocks dovetailed into the site in the manner of rival riverine peer (pier) Lord Rogers’ Lloyds Register (above ↑) and 88 Wood Street (still to come ↓).

 

The Slatted Slab Format: Summary

 

Lloyds Building - the prototype, Rogers: 1978-86 – a single block with towers

Lloyds Register (3 blocks) - RogersWillis ‘The Sherkin’ – Foster, 2008 – 2 blocks, the taller sliced into 3 curving verticals

Bishop’s Square (4 blocks) - Foster

Drapers Gardens, Throgmorton Ave – stepped block - Foggo

88 Wood Street (3 blocks) - Rogers

Milton Gate / Moor Lane (single block with towers) – Lasdun & Softley

Channel 4 TV also loosely of this group – Rogers, 1994 ( → 1.Victoria)

 

One is not so keen on the RBS Building at No.250, by EPR (formerly for ABN AMRO, 1997) with its lack of Feng Shui disregarding sharp angles and amorphous form with many a Foster or Rogers exposed concrete pillar, tubular strut and steel hawser over the anonymous atrium; better the small isolated cube of No.20 Bishopsgate (by Matthew Lloyd, 2009) with what appears to be wood slatting but is vari-coloured terracotta 'baguettes', strips in the manner of Grimshaw’s work for UCL (Paul O’Gorman & Roberts Buildings → 16.Bloomsbury); it houses a restaurant and residential accommodation, perfectly excellent I’m sure, if not Patisserie Valerie.

 

Archaeological alert! There's something here, under a sheet of glass level with the pavement ... a momentary hiatus in the remorseless process of geological deposition and stratification .... 

 

Now, just about overlooking the market and Petticoat Lane, Christ Church, Spitalfields, Hawksmoor’s pièce de resistance, and another Betjeman fave. The superimposed arched assemblies of the west portico– Tuscan broken pediment over central Venetian opening – and the tower above, define the building’s impact. Within, a series of shallow domes a la St. Pauls, aisles of inward trans-axial coffered barrel vaults on intense Corinthian entablatures and capitals - all now white in place of the faded citrus and stil de grain tints of old. The carved organ case for so long achingly and poignantly empty, marvellously restored.

 

Nido Spitalfield at 344 feet the tallest student accommodation block there is, higher than Sky Plaza in Leeds or those chimney stacks in Loughborough. T.P. Bennett the architects. It serves London Met but not, to my uncertain knowledge, exclusively, being one of those commercial, private ventures. The Law Department, London Metropolitan University by Wright & Wright, picked out by Powell as a sensible, no-nonsense work but one thinks ‘bleak’, the dull orange engineering brick and black frame fenestration very ‘Eighties’.

 

Cutler’s Gardens was built on the site of the East India Company Warehouses (including houses for the Company’s officers) saved from demolition, oldest of which the Old Bengal Warehouse of 1769-71 by the Company’ Surveyor Richard Jupp (with George Wyatt), 1769-71, rusticated stone and yellow brick; work continued under subsequent surveyors: Henry Holland 1792-1800 and S.P. Cockerell, c.1820. In 1978-82 the site was ‘revamped’ by Seifert and then again by Quinlan Terry, 1984-5. Much lost, including the Middlesex Street warehouse frontage of 1799[v] with Nos.109-17 now Coventry University .... (see various other East India locations in this chapter and Box: East India Company → 5.Strand).

 

Bishopsgate Institute – Charles Harrison Townshend – lurks among the rather decrepit mix of street frontages on the east side of Bishopsgate, one of his three iconic works along with Whitechapel Art Gallery ( → 9. East) and the Horniman Museum ( → 30.South).

 

Now to BROADGATE –

No. 155, Bishopsgate Exchange - the ‘skyscraper on its side’, is first, presenting a vast retro-Deco excrescence all along Bishopsgate - 800 feet, equal to Somerset House’s river front - with flanking oriel-cum-cylinder corner towers capped by skeletal openwork ‘domes’ (or coronet cupolas - it fits all categories!. N.b. St. Mary-le-Bow first had this skeletal faux dome. Once more the miscegenous idiom, á la Pelli’s World Financial Centre, the polished reddish-brown and grey granite with stamped out square openings unwrapping the green steel mullioned mirror glass, the centrepiece and outer projections pure Chrysler, or 54 Lombard Street, or 125 London Wall (ahead ↓), Peterborough Court (→ 6.Holborn), Globe House or Charing Cross Station (→ 5.Strand) – plenty to choose. More at home in Jakarta or Dubai.

 

It’s by SOM – as is the rest of Phase II. Now, I’ve mentioned the giant American firm at least twice already, and we saw them influencing matters in Victoria Street much earlier (New Scotland Yard → 1.Victoria). I do need to talk about Skidmore Owings & Merrill. For the Broadgate project, Bruce Graham was the key figure, but SOM was never about one man. Oh no. The famous ‘Partners’ – a kind of democratic yet secretive club of very clever chaps (and chappesses) rather like a law firm (or the Co-op, come to that) – spawned from the original enterprising duo of Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings, who actually decided to work together while sat atop their luggage waiting for a train at Paddington (→ 23.Paddington). They were soon joined by design genius Gordon Bunshaft, who did the early icons, including Lever House, more or less the company logo; then Merrill, Hartmann, Bruce Graham, Fazlur Khan (another genius - John Hancock and Sears Tower), Myron Goldsmith, Walter Severinghaus,

Chuck Bassett, Walter Netsch, Natalie de Blois and .... so on. Ad infinitum.

 

The now all but forgotten Norman St. John Stevas (a name prone to scatological association) did himself proud with his anti-American jibe about “revenge of the colonies” (or some such), choking on his own spleen-vented jingoism, a splenetic outburst of Thatcherite, rightwing snobbery and arrogance which says much about Britain at the time. Well, the Brits certainly learnt some from this project: CAD, fast-track construction, value engineering, 'shell and core', to name but four.

 

Back to the buildings. This Phase II is now dominated by Broadgate Tower, presenting a rare instance of verticality at the time when the laurels were being yielded to Canary Wharf, the insistent cross bracing referencing Khan’s John Hancock, (totem? tejen?) the shrine of skyscraper enthusiasts worldwide. The cut off, acute-angled profile defies the viewfinder, an elusiveness at once transporting and frustrating.

 

The curvaceous 201 Bishopsgate connects via the ‘Galleria’, an awkward insertion of hi-tech fenestration that would no doubt appeal to Foster. Turning we duck under Exchange Square, the back door to Liverpool Street, with iconic bridging arch (mimicking St. Pancras) a ghostly image through the building but holding it clear of the concourse, so adding to the steel beam and hawsered games that proliferate the City in the unceasing makeover – tinkering with buildings rather than replacing them, re-imagining, expanding, altering, modifying, refurbishing and rediscovering. Here, some genuine theatre: the view opened up to the platforms, the steps and cascade, the five ton sculpture Broadgate Venus by Fernando Botero – one of many memorable works scattered about –‘frolicking’ (Pevsner) by the splashing water . Apparently, the artist also paints, in the manner of Beryl Cook.

 

BROADGATE CIRCLE

Again my Diary:

"a disappointment, steeper terraces than imagined, cluttered with stacked chairs and charmless kiosks, smokers attached at the railings, no refuge)." 

 

In view here, 30 Crown Place – a curvy-topped glass block all green and off-white rectangles, 2008 by Horden Cherry Lee with RHWL – described as ‘South Shoreditch in Hackney’ – the green and cream fascia panels breaking up the usual strip horizontality, reflecting the ‘digital character of the modern workplace’. But you wonder why they knocked down Drapers Gardens, it so has that echo.

 

The scheme continues through to its Phase I elements around FINSBURY AVENUE SQUARE, Arup’s red granite lattice-work with, on west, No.1 Finsbury Avenue, UBS Warburg Offices – dark bronze louvering by Foggo (for Arup), 1982, steel cylinder stairs echoing the Lloyds Building (above ↑). The cylindrical form by Arup again housing ‘Vicinitee’ and the emerging core of Ken Shuttleworth (at Make)’s giant flatpack No.5 Broadgate complete the view. Sculpture abounds: Rush Hour by George Segal; Bellorophon Taming Pegasus by Jaques Liptchitz and Richard Fenner’s 55 foot high Fulcrum one could hardly overlook yet easily mistake for yet another building in this place of multifarious forms.

 

Overall one has gone from the silver wrapping of SOM to the milk chocolate waffled luxuriance of Arup to the delicate dark chocolate flake of Foggo-Arup ....mmm, and all these sculptures are so many soft centres. With the application for Grade II listing and the rise of Shuttleworth’s gun-metal grey Kenzo Tange-like excluding idiom of No.5, the ‘campus in the City’ goes from strength to strength.

 

All Hallows, London Wall (‘on-the-Wall’) This one when viewed along London Wall really is crushed by Heron (as mentioned at St. Botolph’s, earlier). 1765-67 Rebuilt George Dance Jnr; a plain box, better interior. The tower projects and supports a belfried cupola. The brick tube-station flanks were not meant to be seen. Interior a masterpiece of restraint, the engaged Ionic columns supporting the shallow-coffered barrel vault, white and gilded, the narthex with half-dome apse (half-dome exedra), diagonally coffered (wonderful geometry – I always think), with decoration deriving from the Temple of Venus and Rome.

An important church of the later C18th neo-Classical phase (post mid C18th Palladian Burlington & Kent), along with St. Chad’s Shrewsbury. Inside, we follow Summerson: these simple geometric forms are the hallmarks of ‘neo-classicism’; the sharpness of detail from Piranesi – who also influenced decisions at Newgate Gaol (→ 7.St. Pauls).

 

Moorhouse is another curve of glass, this time Foster, of medium height and distinction, on the corner of a mass of coalesced build – and is rather too much like the new London City Hall (→ 31.South Bank) for comfort, notwithstanding the latter’s sort of ‘falling over’ aesthetic. More an armadillo than anything.

 

What is it about Foster? A fear of commitment to real monumentality? A fear of art? Architecture itself? Engineering is his mantra; his God Brunel, not Wren.

 

It marks the start of London Wall coming west from Moorgate Station.

 

Immense Winchester House, London Wall / Old Broad Street – Swanke, Hayden, Connell[i] dominates in ‘honey-coloured French limestone’, successfully hiding its ugly double attic with a grille canopy which also serves to emphasise the curved corner fad (we saw under the Walbrook Building → 8.City 1).

 

Carpenters Hall steps out onto the pavement (see Atlas Assurance → 8. City 1). It’s by William Wilmer Pocock (who did the Metropolitan Tabernacle → 31.South), 1880, has more than a touch of Jones Banqueting House Cinquecento about it, was salvaged in 1956-60 by Whinney, Son & Austen Hall, replacing the Blitzed 1429 original. Eighteen different types of wood were used, as if to revenge a fiery past. The banqueting hall proper is modern, by Clifford Wearden of Basil Spence & Partners, with stained glass and Rhodesian teak flooring - odd given the fluted elm and mahogany panelling. Like the mongrel we had, half Rhodesian Ridgeback.

 

Drapers Gardens on Throgmorton Avenue, by Foggo, replaced Seifert’s fine green convex tower (as we saw above ↑); another of the complex profiled, high-tech, multi-block, thoroughly engineered solutions to the complexity of the contemporary planning brief – meeting all considerations: aesthetic, financial, environmental, transport, heritage and fashion - all at once.

 

Chartered Accountants' Hall 1890-93 John Belcher and Beresford Pite, an iconic work, the confection of freely interpreted Genoese Baroque. Crimped rustication at the basement, rich Corinthian cornice, inventive keystones and sculpture by Thorneycroft and Bates, all credited with influencing the direction of Edwardian Baroque. To Pevsner: 'eminently original and delightfully picturesque'. The 1930s extension by Joass continued the style down Great Swan Alley and the corner where a show-offy, scrolled open pediment is William Whitfield’s parody / tribute to the original before plunging headlong into C20th Brutalist ‘reeded’ or ‘bush-hammered’ concrete. The conceit appears part of the old, just that; others might have inveigled a bit of brushed concrete to underscore the point. He also somehow inveigled a new Great Hall within.

 

At the junction of MOORGATE PLACE and GREAT SWAN ALLEY opposite each other, corner oriel supported by Harry Bates’s Atlantes and a modern bronze swan in flight on Whinney Mackay-Lewis’s 1986-89 Lloyds Bank. Round the corner MOORGATE, Aston Webb’s 1928 Ocean Accident (now Habib Bank) displays nautical elements including a fully working lighthouse.

 

Girdlers’ Hall The 1680-81 original was destroyed in 1940 and this neo-Georgian gem is by C. Ripley.[iv] Shielding it, with the help of one of the obsolescent London Wall point blocks (City Tower, we’ll come to below ↓), is

 

1 Coleman Street, again relatively modest in scale but very, very slick, a luscious white polished concrete and glass objet by David Walker, 2007 and something of a pioneer in the fad for recycled, secondary materials, notably china clay stent, a waste granite material. Here’s the rubric: every tonne of china clay generates around 4.5 tonnes of stent, which is usually tipped on spoil heaps; the use of 6,000 tonnes of stent at Coleman Street meant an equivalent saving in spoil hence 6,000 fewer tonnes of aggregate quarried. Also, pulverised fuel ash (PFA) in place of Portland cement, in varied proportions and, finally, 100% scrap metal reinforcement. With this approach, the overall recycled/secondary content of the concrete increased tenfold, from the 5% level (by mass) typical of current construction to 50%.

 

Armourers Hall 31 Coleman Street . Stock brick ‘stiffened by Doric pilasters’[v] by Good, the Company surveyor, 1839-41, altered in 1870s by Alexander Graham, including the lantern. Like All Hallows (↑), the north side was never meant to be seen. Interior ‘bristles’ with ... well, you’ve guessed it.

 

Salters Company was formerly elsewhere (Salters Hall Court, Cannon Street → 8. City). This is 1968 Basil Spence, finished off by Bonington (as also Kensington Civic Centre → 28.Kensington). It has something of the ‘crème et brun’ we’ve already seen ( → 8.City) and are about to witness more of but here a delicious white offsets the brown fascia and cameos the coat of arms. 1887 wrought iron gates from the previous hall are the highlight, in Fore Street. Tavertine-lined entrance hall by David Hicks adds gold to white.

 

In MOORGATE comes Electra House 1902-03 Belcher & Joass, of which we mentioned the ‘junior’ version on Victoria Embankment (→ 5.Strand) – hubristic Edwardian Baroque with cupola, refurbished of late by London Metropolitan University.

 

FINSBURY CIRCUS

Now Lutyens: Britannic House (not to be confused with the modernist Britannic House (↓ below) – another Edwardian icon: it’s a quadrant – segment, really - of the elliptical Circus (to Jones and Woodward it should have been the whole). The giant Corinthian order sits up on the third level, the cornice broken into block entablatures over each column, the walls disintegrated by immense arches in contrast with the high wall to opening ratio below. Whole books could and have been written, so get the binoculars out and pick out a recessed window with suavely handled rustication, unfluted columns with their novel capitals and the floating rusticated head. Within, another parasitical revamp - by Inskip & Jenkins.

 

The rest of the surrounding fabric is altogether more conventional and rather oppressive, heavy – Salisbury House, London Wall Buildings, et al, Beaux Arts classicism- and one shares J&W’s regret, all these giant columns and pilasters, vertiginous mansards, over-egged centrepieces. Imposing, after a fashion, one has to concede, in their own way, but the swagger is deflated by Lutyens smoothly profiled, diminutively apertured, deftly proportioned surfaces - and exquisite detailing. In the NE quadrant, Park House, Gordon & Gunton, 1921, with a giant order (see BOX in → 16.Bloomsbury on all this), presents a concave mirror of Unilever (→ 6.Holborn) and, like that, is still another revamp, ‘retained facade’, miscegenous, parasitical – cuckoo in the nest.

 

Back outside and LONDON WALL used to present a series of anonymous blocks at angles to the eponymous thoroughfare, sixties urban chic soon emptied of all glamour, the Bond and Modesty Blaise associations yielding the paralysing emptiness of Harry Palmer and, for me (and switching location for a moment) a dazed George Segal in Quiller Memorandum pursued on the autobahn to that ominous John Barry track, the serried blocks swishing anonymously by either side of the concrete and tarmac, the imprisoning railings, elevated walkways. Drab, drab, drab. The ultimate block (chronologically and geographically) seems to have sensed the gloom and is smart bronze, raised thrillingly clear of its podium. Only one left now.

 

Bastion House 140 London Wall, Powell & Moya of bronze curtain-walling ‘rebukes’ the earlier London Wall efforts – one could not put it better, really[i]. under threat We’ve just mentioned City Tower actually in Basinghall Street, in its new blue finish, the last of the original angled blocks, enclosing Girdlers’ Hall. It’s next to City Place House the PO-MO rather silly orange and cream Lego brick effect – a variation on crème et brun by Swanke Hayden Connell. Under threat.

 

1 South Place with M&S on Moorgate and otherwise presenting a glass curvy wall, all cable-braced to screen the silvery towers (on frosty nights?) - Shepherd Robson 1996.

 

City Point is here, the King of London Wall and sixties icon, riding high above the surrounding humbler if hardly deferential forms. Britannic ‘House’ as was, then ‘Tower’, the smooth green monolith with it vertical supports all exposed and glinting, stood unopposed all the way to Vickers and Euston, yielding only to the Post Office Tower. It then lost its ‘Sixties appeal’ in favour of a silly hat and rounded edges. Makes it taller, though.

 

Behind it now, the anachronistically ‘stacked’ form of Ropemaker House by Ove Arup – in profile worryingly similar to 200 Aldersgate (below↓), six interlocking blocks but this time with skilfully conceived elevations, slanted windows and glassy grey-silver metallic finish: self-effacing (one thinks immediately of its many polar opposites: Central St. Giles (→ 17.Covent Garden) or the Fitzroy and Farrell idioms. All terribly hi-tech, of course: energy saving, low-emission, environmentally sound, a cooling facade (the angled fenestration), brise-soleil and biomass boilers ....

 

Next door, facing onto Chiswell Street, Milton Gate (also referred to as 1 Moor Lane / Chiswell Street) – ‘uncharacteristic’ Lasdun, with Peter Softley & Associates, 1987-91, bolted-on panes of deep, sea-green glass over an inner wall of framed glass, all of which produces a mysterious depth and translucence[ii]. But the form of the building is also particular: it may have influenced 88 Wood Street and the Lloyds Register of Shipping, and all that ilk, to which we come anon.

 

First, though, Milton Court, now home of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and The Heron, a 36-floor apartment tower. School by RHWL Arts Team, tower concept by David Walker; exec architects RHWL Arts Team. Former includes a 610-seat Concert Hall, 225-seat Theatre, Studio Theatre, three major rehearsal rooms and a TV studio suite. Nuff said.

 

Just up, BUNHILL FIELDS the Nonconformist burial ground with monuments to Defoe, Blake, Bunyan and others of our travelling companions, not to forget ‘Coade Stone’ Eleanor.

 

And finally, FINSBURY SQUARE (1777, George Dance) - an edge of City space we've already harped upon. It'sdominated by the conglomerate form of Royal London House -Triton Court (with Mercury, Jupiter & Neptune ....), insurance offices of the Royal London Friendly Society; also Finsbury Guildhall and the opaquely named Offices, 30 Finsbury Square by Eric Parry (again – see above↑) with that syncopated rhythm of Portland stone openings which creates a stroboscopic effect (and could be traced to various 1950s gurus but needn’t). It’s in fact a carapace for the inner glass walls and not too far off the USS Embassy wrap around effect in Grosvenor Square ( → 19.Mayfair). Nicer, somehow. This square has been re-generated with a new utility building by Architects Network which goes well. It’s the sort of comfortable size of urban space that works, like San Francisco’s Union Square but could, with that 1929 towered edifice, on a summer’s day, be Plaza Cataluña ...

 

Barcelona again, there’s a lot of it about (the Gherkin &, up ahead, Wood Street Police Station →).

 

Here stood the Temple of the Muses, James Lackington’s bookstore, all 43m of street front, with its circular counter and dome[i]. Livingstone lived here and Bruckner composed his ‘Resurrection’ 2nd Symphony at No. 39-45, in 1871.

 

The end of London Wall is slammed shut by the Gotham City nightmare (125 London Wall or Alban Gate) of Terry Farrell, Pevsner and/or Simon Bradley dub the ‘cuckoo in the nest’ We have a different use for that phrase, however, to which this seems quite opposite.

 

The Museum of London, a place where once enthralled we set off the alarm, a habit (see Lloyds Building earlier↑) a friend returning from the state of once freed slaves. One cannot argue with its location, site, configuration or alignment but the curving black brick is very ‘underpass’ albeit fit for purpose, I suppose. Arguably, the tunnelling in is indeed fit for purpose, inveigling, ingratiating, mysterious: “Come inside ....” it seems to say. And within, much to savour.

 

1 London Wall – we won’t mention the architect, or rather ‘engineer’ - wraps around the traffic island into St. Martin's Le Grand opposite the Museum and somehow also atop the Worshipful Company of Plaisterers thus entombing its Adam style halls, made windowless at ground level. Bizarre but part of the protocol of burial one assumes, accelerating the process by which the layers of the metropolis are subsumed into strata and crushed only to be burst out again as subterranean strata in eons of time ahead ....

 

The latest development, London Wall Place, is still in the offing but probably too late to stop as I write. It’s the baby of ‘Make’ (sic) a latter-day Architects’ Collaborative – how Rogers used to be – founded by Ken Shuttleworth, an ex-Foster man (see also University Square, Stratford → 9.East). This will basically transform the whole Wall –

 

They are also doing 5 Broadgate (as we saw earlier↑ )next to Liverpool Street Station. These Hammerson guys are responsible for a lot around here – most of it pretty suave one may concede, reluctantly.

 

Next, The Barbican, termite city - more at home in the Sahara, alongside Djénné or Timbuktu, perhaps. One visited a friend here – back in the 70s when it was all still palpably new - and marvelled at the view of .... well, yes, you do get a wonderful view of the million other apartments and of the concrete surfaces about. The three towers (can never be sure if one is a little shorter ....) descry a myriad of curved balconies so numerous one is literally dazed and the Brutalist stele seem to comb the sky and torment the very clouds. The surfaces everywhere of brownish concrete embedded or textured with stone or some composite. Pick-hammered. Yet that was never the plan. Much like ‘our cathedral’ (or any of the medieval cathedrals) great luxuriance was the plan. Mosaics, tiles, paint ....

 

Chamberlin Powell & Bon. The commission that brought the partnership fame – too late for my father ....

 

Incidentally, that friend preferred a hotel in Frinton near his ancestral Voysey home with its billiard room and boxy newel staircase. He had travelled out with the Groundnuts Scheme then ‘stayed on’. Through Independence, Africanisation and Ujamaa. Eventually came capitulation and escape – when he could not take Kibwana, his ‘boy’, into Zambia. Repulsed at Tanga. The dog had been buried out at Ocean Road but now his world fell apart ....

 

And one should stop by at The Barbican Arts Centre – to use its generic term (there are several venues, halls, exhibition spaces) is arguably – though later addition - the success story here, attract the crème de la crème of performers, for whatever reason, despite its confusing interior and those discombobulating bridges that appear from out of nowhere, like something in a Fritz Lang or Spielberg, Proyas film-set. Metropolis to Robocalypse. You expect a row of Daleks or Transformers to glide past .... which wouldn’t be inappropriate here.

 

But, in among all this, of course, there is a square and, wonder of wonders, a church, not only that but one that is blissfully and extraordinarily medieval. St. Giles, Cripplegate, pre-Fire East Anglian Perpendicular, restored by Victorians and again in the C20th, marooned in the termite city, an act bordering dangerously on tokenism, reducing the venerable to mere decoration, sanitised out of its original purpose, much in the way Foster has done to the BM Reading Room.

 

Not to be be missed:, the magnifique

YMCA, 2 Fann Street Chamberlin Powell & Bon, 1971: ‘In the quaint City of the 1970s, eight floors of rooms for men were separated from four floors of rooms for girls by a single floor of staff flats - no doubt with a thin blue line of ex-prison warders manning the stairwells late at night’. Empty since 2012, to be refurbished as flats.

 

One could also have a quick look at the Golden Lane Estate to the north of here or wait until we reach it on the next leg ( →11.Holborn Circus - Clerkenwell). By the same architects. The comparison is salutary: the difference between ‘City centre’ and ‘Inner City’, between City execs and ordinary folks, the chattering and the delving classes, Mozart and X Factor. The Guildhall School of Music and Barbican Arts Centre .... but no, that’s where the divide blurs. Things change.

 

And the grocer – to die for. Barbican Grocers, Aldersgate. We’re there in just a mo.

 

More churches. All these churches! So close, you can’t help stumbling into them, tripping over their thresholds almost ...

 

St. Alphage, London Wall tower only, C14th, rebuilt 1777 & 1924. Perhaps the most tragic and sombre tale of all - a story of relentless and pitiless attacks which finally through fire, blitz, neglect and wanton destruction have finally reduced all to a pathetic and picturesque follied remnant. Once a Venetian window set between columns did battle with medieval doorway, arcades and tower. Alas.

 

LITTLE BRITAIN

The street is charming and here are authentic surviving commercial premises of note. If only t'were more.

 

200 Aldersgate Street Fitzroy Robinson & Partners, again (they of crème et brun - see under Royal Exchange → 8.City 1), as ‘dreadful’ Mitre House at No.160 (in Pevsner’s famous jibe at the Colonel, straddling Montagu Street (thus creating a cavern) in ‘80s Thatcherite rampant PoMo mode, its stepped profile a habit clearly too hard to relinquish but out of scale (compare Ashdown House → 1.Victoria) and without justification, aesthetic or otherwise, only the remnants of the concept visible in these tautologous usurpations of service tower; the brown and bronze-gold fascia everywhere shouts ‘Loadsamoney’ befitting its one-time occupants. N.b. Mitre ‘s projecting lattices (unglazed oriels) about which Pevsner got so hot under the collar, receive an unexpected and vindicating reprise at Broadgate (↑ above). I once had a nightmare, the stepped profile become surreal, breaking off in modular units, cubes of ‘70s ‘knitted sweater’ floating down and stacking up .....

 

St. Botolph, Aldersgate Street 1788-89 Nathaniel Wright and/or Nathaniel EvansA low box, the most visible face east, of white rusticated plasterwork, central Palladian window (columned version of Venetian) framed by paired Ionic columns under a pediment adorned only by a clock face, the sides brick and austere as a prison wall, the west with its tower secluded in summer and in winter skeined in rural leafy foliage. An ‘exalting’ (Betjeman) barrel-vaulted interior.Inside, that wonderful half-dome apse? But it’s usually closed.

 

Now two Wren churches:

 

St. Anne & St. Agnes you may have spotted from St. Vedast (→7.Ludgate Hill). It’s actually in Gresham Street, tucked in off Aldersgate and so very close to St. Botolph’s (above)1677-80 (1676-87 according to Betjeman) a rather Dutch feel with small pediments over rusticated brick arches on both axes, as this is cruciform in plan. No dome, though: just a groin vault. Robert Hooke may have made a contribution. Not every church can claim Milton, Bunyan and Wesley among its parishioners (despite what one said earlier). Lutheran now - the Estonian and Latvian communities. They also have services in Swahili ... mm ,I should have known, what with the ‘double AA’ dedication.

 

Turning down to 100 Wood Street Foster – another one trumpeted by City of London Walks, the stroboscopic openings in traditional limestone so reminiscent of Eric Parry in Finsbury Square (→ 11.Holborn) several years prior. Above, the convex fold-away roof with its diagonal chequerboard is both unfortunate and unnecessary, just so much post-modern excess. A bit like my Boots hot-water bottle.

 

88 Wood Street, as already mentioned, one of this genre of closely-set narrow blocks, contemporary with the same architect (Rogers)’ Lloyds Register of Shipping and visually of a pair. The three blocks parallel and differentiated in height rather than as equal parallel wedges – this in deference to St. Alban (↓below) with yellow as ever to the fore (see Riverbank House → 8.City; Yellow Building → 28.Hammersmith; Barking Central → 12.NE Wedge and, most recently, the Cheesegrater ↑), here in the service core’s pre-tensioned stair flights and rods. Again Koolhaas tends to follow the genre (→ 8.City 1). No, the Lloyd’s Building: that’s where all this began, all these service towers and exposed ducts.

 

(n.b. 1 Wood Street by Fletcher Priest is in → 7.St. Pauls) 

 

5 Aldermanbury Square 2007, Eric Parry, exciting double (horizontally and vertically) cambered form in a visually impactive 2500 tonnes of large-gauge stainless steel cladding with openings enclosing three or two floors at a go and concealing a structural framework within. The window sills like amplifier controls, the whole thing like my brush-steel fascia Sansui amp from the ‘70s but the openings subtly staggered to break up or, if you will, add texture to the rhythm; the interplay of this outer skin with the internal fenestration sets up an intriguing contrapuntal geometry that goes to make this building leap out of its brief and into the realm of the monumental.

 

Also a bit like a stencil thing you have inside a piece of electrical equipment (such as an amplifier) made of cardboard or some insulating material with all these random rectangular holes cut out and it lays in against something .....

 

City of London Police Station, Wood Street and Love Lane – by Donald McMorran 1963-66 a remarkable double edifice in Portland Stone, the lower rusticated in the manner of the ‘Kojak’9th Precinct Station in New York City (Hoppin & Koen, 1912) but it’s the higher block that ‘sends’, the high gable-topped tower with stencilled out staccato openings , the proportions and aspect of the whole, especially the scale, out of sync and causing a double-take – the nearest analogue must be the Palau Reial Major in Barcelona, that similarly oddly-scaled block with tiers of arches; or again, the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in the EUR, Mussolini’s fascist utopia outside Rome.

 

South side

10 Gresham Street – 18m column-free spans and full height glazing explain this remarkably fleet piece of design by our 'latter-day GG Scott', the black steel fascias offering highly effective contrast with the Portland clad, the top-lit corner stair towers flanged outward, recalling work from a number of different eras.

 

squeezed in here

6 Gutter Lane – Manicomio Restaurant – reminds one of the similar isolated box in Bishop’s Square (above ↑) also involving Foster – but where that is a toastie, this is a white and silver extension of the toaster aesthetic outdoors – Dualit, Morphy Richards, Tefal.

 

South side, next door:

20 Gresham Street Kohn Pederson Fox, stunning gold aluminium fascia, bulbous curving forms, grilles, a complex of whizzing horizontals: grilles, battens, louvers, mullions, transoms. Once again, column-free spaces furnished by large floor plates. One of the Walbrook / Botox / Wobble genre.

 

It replaces Clements House, Nos.14-18 Gresham Street – 1954-57, Trehearne & Norman, Preston & Partners– it had , according to Pevsner, wonderful mosaics (ah!) in the fascia/spandrels.

 

And so on to opposite the Guildhall:

30 Gresham Street by Sidell Gibson Associates (who were exec architects for 1 New Change) for Kleinwort Dresdner Wasserstein (another Land Securities development), another curvaceous one, all in white, more giant footplates too, the size of a football pitch, according to Albion Stone, who supplied the Portland stone for the fins, columns and all the rest, giving monumentality to the otherwise largely glazed walls. The previous 1950s building had mosaic (ah!) panels of grey and mauve. And the archaeological dig found a gilded Roman arm now in the Museum of London.

 

St. Alban, Wood Street tower only, another sad remnant, particularly forlorn among all this madness of high-level pedestrian labyrinthine ramps and passageways. Wren Perpendicular, it had lierne vaults and low profile five-point arches; burnt out in the war, now a private house.

 

Towers only, ruins- Falling falling

These churches have only the tower remaining with perhaps a little outer wall. They are no longer churches:

 

Christchurch, Newgate

St. Martin Orgar – tower for St. Clement Eastcheap

All Hallows, Staining

Christ Church Greyfriars; destroyed in the Blitz. Ruins are a public garden, tower a multi-storey private houseSt Alban, Wood Street; destroyed in the Blitz. Tower is private dwelling

St Augustine Watling Street; destroyed in the Blitz. Tower part of St Paul's Cathedral Choir School

St Dunstan-in-the-East; destroyed in the Blitz. Ruins are a public garden

St Mary Somerset; body of the church demolished in 1871. Tower surrounded by small garden

St Olave Old Jewry; body of the church was demolished in 1887. Remains including tower now an office building

 

Re-ordered for new use

St Edmund, King and Martyr; from 2001 the London Centre for Spirituality

 

Gone altogether

All Hallows-the-Great, Upper Thames Street

St. Alphage, London Wall fragment

St Swithun London Stone (destroyed by the Blitz)

 

Pewterers Hall snuckers in amongst the same masses between Wood Street and Noble Street ... and thus occupies the site of the Roman Fort and barracks. A neat brick box in amongst the glass and steel development between Noble Street and Wood Street. D.E. Nye & Partners 1961 ‘all but neo-Georgian’ and panelling and three Georgian chandeliers from the old Lime Street premises.

 

Goldsmiths’ Hall is, among the livery halls, pretty well pre-eminent, though almost entirely rebuilt after the war and not always to the best brief. Philip Hardwick, the frontage of six giant columns closely set (Eustyle, perhaps) with capitals from the Temple of Mars Ultor in Rome[iii]. Several rooms to see, grandest, of course, the Livery Hall proper which for banqueting purposes seats 232 but with 500 ‘standing room only’ for the customary shin-digs thrown by Les Anglaises ....

 

Oh look, I;ve been kicked out - the website and the Honourable Company have joined in booting one onto the next page - see you there!