Andrew Ashdown

LONDON NOW:

An Oyssey Through the Nation's Capital

 

5 THE STRAND

 

We enter then the ceremonial route, the chassis or axle of the whole machine: The Strand to Aldwych, Fleet Street and Ludgate Hill. The way to The City.

 

Charing Cross Station

Immediately, at right, the grand old lady - mercifully spared in the horrid redevelopment - to all extent and purposes a replica of the Pavilion at Lords, complete with changing rooms, restaurants, even Long Bar, this latter serving in the office of a dining or conference room for, these days, shall we say, less enraptured clientele. The Eleanor Cross outside replicates the dénouement to the series of twelve crosses across the east midlands marking Eleanor of Castile’s cortege from Lincoln, marking the overnight stops along the route. Twelve Stations of the Cross. More cap doffing to the French King and fellow crusader, Louis. Harby to Westminster, Tunis to St. Denis[i] . One thinks of Livingstone, of Chuma and Susi.

 

Just three crosses survive: Geddington and Hardingstone (both in Northants - my neck of the woods - Woburn and Stony Stratford, also stops, are also near me) and Waltham Cross. None of these C13th survivors has kept its original cross ‘of immense height’. The London cross, originally in Whitehall, was destroyed in 1647 and replaced with the equestrian Charles I. The replica was put up in 1865 - Mansfield Portland stone and Aberdeen granite, E.M. Barry - to publicise the new hotel.

 

There was also, of course, one in Cheapside (→ 8.City) demolished by the Puritans.That these peculiarly ornate and piquantly allusive tabernacles helped redirect the whole course of English architecture, from the ‘Decorated’ style to ‘Perpendicular’ – is not often realised, Henry VII’s Chapel at Westminster Abbey being the direct and climactic result. Nor is that the end of the matter, for another source springs is nigh: the old St. Stephens Chapel whose aura still pervades the Houses of Parliament.

 

Down in Charing X Underground the story is rendered on concave walls in the manner of the Bayeux Tapestry. David Gentlemen. A man of diverting inclinations: stamps, coins ... India.

 

We head down to VICTORIA EMBANKMENT, the sewer-concealing, Thames-narrowing marvel of Sir Joseph Bazalgette – Waterloo and Thames Embankments too - and Waterloo Bridge. Beyond railings, York House Watergate marks the original line of the river. Circa 1626, variously attributed: Inigo Jones, Balthazar Gerbier (slippery diplomat[ii]) or, more credibly, the mason Nicholas Stone whose other work has the required zest: Stowe Nine Churches, Northants, recumbent effigy of Lady Carey; Great t Brington, Northants, altar tomb of Lord and Lady Spencer; Oxford Botanical Gardens gateway - and John Donne’s tomb in St. Pauls. Much else.

 

The inward-facing plaque to Bazalgette could perhaps be larger. Dan Cruikshank bemoaned the loss of Georgian frontage but we now have a place to perambulate. And this is not Venice. Despite Canaletto.

 

Cleopatra’s Needle 1878 (1450 BC) presented in 1819 – took a while to get here, what with the shipwreck

 

ADAM vs. CHAMBERS

We come to the Adam vs. Chambers debate (issue, conundrum,diversion) Akin, to mighty John Summerson, to Thomas Gainsborough vs. Joshua Reynolds ...

Sansovino vs. Palladio

(Giovanni) Bellini vs. Raphael

(Vincenzo) Bellini (active 1820-35) vs. Rossini

Nelson vs. Wellington

Pairs are crucial. Tweedledum and Tweedledee. ...

 

However, but not, I think, Baker v. Soane! Chambers published his Treatise of Civil Architecture in 1759 while Adam published a ‘folio’ on Diocletian in 1764, one of three key documents of the period with: Stuart & Revett’s Antiquities of Athens and Robert Wood’s Ruins of Palmyra Chambers – conservative, academic, establishment; Adam’s style ‘exploded’ (in his own words) the rules.

 

Their two buildings, The Adelphi and Somerset House, both adopt the watery situation of Spalato. The strictures and grammar of Palladianism required a rusticated plinth / base surmounted by columns (see ‘raised porticos’ obsession at→ 16.Bloomsbury). Somerset House was only the third major new public building in London, following Inigo Jones’s Banqueting House and Kent and Vardy’s Horse Guards. The Strand front ‘uncommunicative’, except as viewed from the twin Bush Houses. Loggia rather good, though. Despite the loss of the Adelphi, we have all these Adam houses ... plus Kenwood, Syon, Osterley (a full list in Sumemrson p.146)

 

THE ADELPHI

It is a more than a matter of curiosity that the Adams’ masterpiece is now remembered by this odd customer, the New Adelphi, or Adelphi Terrace, 1930s Art Deco by Colcutt and Hamp, straight out of Manhattan. It rather lacks the thrust of the ‘Rock’; for a closer fit, perhaps the aborted Met Life Building. ‘The simple, thin bricked design is reminiscent of Dudok's work yet the over-the-top friezes, including elephants and fish, are more in the Art Deco style as is the imposing doorway’[i]. The names of various UK cities adorn. Within, chandeliers and marble columns. Round the block into Adelphi Terrace angelic faces siren the London Transport Clipper revellers. So there’s an C18th sensibility at work here.

 

The Adelphi was, of course, the Adams’ urban renovation project: αδελφοί - named for all three brothers. It’s destruction is generally regarded as, architecturally speaking, the greatest disaster since the Fire (notwithstanding ‘Bakerloo’s work at the Bank of England). All that’s left are the houses on Robert Street and John Adam Street, either side of the Royal Society of Arts.

 

But to get some idea (however imperfect) of what might have been we have Somerset House in which Chambers brazenly followed the same format, a raised embankment, having earlier derided the scheme. Adam too was influenced by Spalato.

 

Next door Temple Underground Station is in remarkably sympathetic design. Harry Ford, 1915[i]. Next is Shell-Mex, another echo of New York: sheer, overbearing bulk, a Leviathan thwarting its neighbours on all sides and rounded off by the colossal clock face ‘Big Benzene’ - somewhat superfluous in view of a certain neighbour, but here to order the lives of denizens of the still greater complex across the river (of which more later). As Jones & Woodward well describe, fit for a mantelpiece. I fear it may have inspired many a later and further flung grotesquery.

 

THE SAVOY

This area, with now its hotel, theatre and chapel, is on land given by Henry III to Peter of Savoy in 1246, i.e. contemporary with Westminster Abbey. The Palace of John of Gaunt, torched in the Peasants’ Revolt, remodelled as a prison, then Henry VII’s hospital for the poor (a bath, a night’s rest and medical care) and into decline. By the C18th it had been barracks, prison and place of refuge - Jesuits and French Protestants. All swept away by Bazalgette.

 

The Savoy Hotel’s eliding Art Deco porte cochére beckons down London’s only left-hand drive. Within, the tawdriness of over-zealous reproduction is unavoidable. Gone the way of Harrods and Raffles – glitz replaces grace. Ah well. Dinner at the Savoy .... used to mean something. I doubt if a single phrase can capture so well all that’s glamorous and, at the same time, for most of us - unobtainable. Dinner at the Savoy, Tea at the Ritz, lunch (‘luncheon’), at Claridge’s. A hamper from Fortnum & Mason: Bollinger, beluga and caviar. We are talking, of course, Savoy Grill, celebrated rendezvous of the Bright Young Things, aesthetes - Acton, Powell, Waugh, Byron - Oxford bon-viveurs, heirs to landed titles, making their names in the colonies: Happy Valley, White Mischief, Out of Africa, Vertical Land. And, before that, the Bloomsbury intellectuals: Mitfords, Cooper, Sackville-West and Sitwell; born to rule, like the Astors and Cecils. These are such as live a charmed life. One has passed it by (life, hotel) often, the steel canopies unavoidable en route to Covent Garden or Stanley Gibbons. And, as I walk, recollect that I too once dwelt among the chosen. Had sat in rooms above Tom Quad applying Occam’s Razor; walked leafy lanes to great houses, breathed the air of the Kenya Highlands, dined on silver of the Uganda Railway - the Iron Snake, EAR&H - endured the rituals of public school and attended chapel in an MA gown. But this was yesterday and is no more. And if by chance one should be fated to join again the gilded throng, perhaps, then ‘Dinner at the Savoy’. In the meantime, dissimulation is the key. “Not forever in green pastures ....” As with that Long Room regular, born to travel first class, with only a second class ticket.

 

The Savoy Chapel is reached on steep grey cobble, sunk below street level, a sudden time-shift, palpable breath of antique, calm and peace restored in all the clutter and dreariness. What we see is 1490s to 1512, the original having been torched by the mob assembled on Blackheath (that also brought down a poll tax). As part of the former Savoy Royal Hospital it is, like the Abbey and St. Margaret’s, Windsor - a Royal Peculiar, also Chapel of the Royal Victorian Order, that indispensable award of which Sir Anthony Blunt was stripped. And a speech therapist made Companion.

 

But we must descend again to get a proper view of our next call ....

 

Savoy Place Home of the IET (Institute of Engineering & Technology - formerly ‘IEE’, Institute of Electronic Engineering) also for a while the BBC – where the boffins and propagandists met in 1922 and then moved in. Its date is 1886, the examinations hall of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons. Before IEE arrived in 1910 alterations were effected by H. Percy Adams and Charles Holden, then by Adams, Holden & Pearson in the 1950s. Memorably neat, red, rather maritime. The interior has Pentelikon marble. Now also for hire - weddings, etc....

 

Back up on THE STRAND and a surprise. The long facades in cream stucco you’d expect in Belgravia or Regent’s Park. Nash – alright. Coutts Bank - the occupant somewhat easier to handle than ‘West Strand Improvements’, a complex of two triangular sites by the Prince Regent’s architect in his trademark cream render, with fanciful octagonal towers. But the facade here is cut by a wall of mirror glass: there’s a similar exercise in Princes Gate, just off Hyde Park; the thinking must be, ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, then .... don’t even bother to try’. The euphony between the pepper-pot corner of the ‘Improvements’ and the half circular bay with attached columns of the Police Station and former Charing Cross Hospital has been well caught on curry15’s photostream on flickr.com:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NASH’ SCHEME

This was the next phase in Nash’s great scheme – going up Charing X Road to the British Museum, including Trafalgar Square, the National Gallery and these, the West Strand Improvements. The pepper-pot corners are to disguise the ‘conflicting angles’, on the same principle as All Souls, Langham Place (→ 18.West End), according, again, to Summerson. We go back in time now. Take the view from here toward Trafalgar Square with St. Martin’s and the National Gallery. Concentrate please! Ignore the buses, the latter-day denizens of Alsatia and the legal community – we’ll get to them soon enough. The bars and trattoria.

 

What to call this? Palladianism? Regency? Canada House (Smirke) and South Africa House (Baker) continue this sequence, albeit elided. The former was the College of Physicians, joined with the Union Club 1822-27 in one monumental block. Only the Ionic Portico remains. A rival Georgian prospect is St. George’s, Hanover Square (→ 19.Mayfair), from St. George’s Street including the church and the square beyond.

 

Next, Zimbabwe House - back to familiar weathered stone yet a turn-of-the-century icon, of sorts, by Charles Holden. The scars of vandalism wrought by the Taliban of yore still distract from the interest of the building with its arched openings, a variant of Venetian window, and proliferation of cornices and niches for Epstein’s rude (nude) statuary – all for medical science, lest one forgets.

 

Rhodesia – never made it there only to the Falls where Smith signed away – as he saw it - a thousand years of benevolent rule, the end of a very peculiar and anachronistic interpretation of governance that has its echoes in the Falklands along with the corridors of certain clubs in Pall Mall and Piccadilly.

 

So Welcome Doors upon Stanley Gibbons emporia for nerds who like to collect the very small – minute, miniscule - bits of paper with intricate, hardly visible, except by dint of magnification, designs, worn and indecipherable, in fact the more tarnished and dull the better, since value is apportioned according to the extant the item is prima facie dull, apparently quotidian - the less provocative and charismatic the design, the more illegible the print and lustreless the tint, the more excited the philatelists become (see also Stanford’s of Long Acre →17.Covent Garden).

 

Exeter Hall by Gandy Deering 1829-31 intended for non-sectarian religious gatherings[vi] and used variously by the Ragged School Union, Sacred Harmonic Society, Bible Society, popular preacher Reverend Charles Spurgeon, the Anti-Slavery Society (Prince Albert attended a meeting in 1840) and the Temperance Society. In Barnham’s Ingoldsby Legends of 1840 we read:

 

Mr. David has since had a ‘serious call’

He never drinks ale, wine, or spirits at all,

And they say he is going to Exeter Hall

To make a grand speech

And to preach and to teach

People that they can't brew their malt liquor too small

 

 

 

In 1880 acquired by the YMCA, demolished 1907 and the Strand Palace Hotel built on the site with the spectacular Art Deco foyer by Oliver P. Bernard (now in the V&A) who also worked on the Cumberland (→24.Mayfair) and the Joe Lyons Corner Houses such as one here on The Strand.

 

Simpsons-in-the-Strand was Mr. Reiss’s ‘home of chess’ and Grand Cigar Divan succumbed to new ownership after the Strand widened, and was rebuilt by T.E. Colcutt as the restaurant which opened in 1904.

 

Just in behind here a proliferation of streets, alleyways and pedestrianisation around Bow Street Magistrates Court heralds the start of what Woodward and Jones call ‘Legal London’ [→ 6.Holborn] where Henry Fielding held court during the Gin Era and, over the years, cases famous and infamous, Crippen and Casanova, the Krays and Oscar Wilde. No longer – alas! Proceedings were ultimately betrayed by farce when a ‘Bunbury’ was brought to trial.

 

We’re back at Somerset House, Chambers' magnum opus,  now squashed behind the dual carriageway on Bazalgette’s colossal terrace. This 800 feet of Thames frontage, through the absence vertical accents, syncopates well with County Hall (→26.South Bank) and the Custom House →(8.City) – if not Parliament. The front entrance and great courtyard, 310 x 350 feet, beckon. Until removed here, the Courthauld Institute was in truth neglected and underrated. Now available for a modest fee. And not alone: the rotating Hermitage Collection and, in the south wing, the Gilbert Collection, private horde of European silverwork, gold Louis XV snuff boxes, miniatures, glass, pietre dure Roman and Florentine mosaics from the 16th to 19th centuries.

 

Otherwise there’s the ice-rink: not Rockefeller Centre but then nor is the New Adelphi. Those wretched fountains, too ... or water-jets (see →9.East or More London →31.South Bank); liable to ruin your best suit.

 

Fact: what Canova missed most about London were St. Paul’s, Somerset House and interior of St. Stephen’s, Walbrook[viii].

 

Next door, Smirke’s drab Kings College buildings need not concern us but, rather, the news, as I write, of finally (after 180 years) the acquisition of the Somerset House East Wing as was always Soane and Smirke’s intent.

 

Now, another unique urban scene (notwithstanding the City’s largesse): the juxtaposition of two church towers, observing the curve of Aldwych. St. Mary le Strand is Gibbs’s masterpiece: exquisite, feminine - Baroque. One of the 1711 Act ‘Fifty’ - no expense spared by the Commissioners for the prominent location. This before the simplified, rationalised and inordinately successful St. Martin’s. Note the side elevations: Palladio in Vicenza. In the upper storey, round-headed windows whose arches sit on mini-entablatures supported by inward facing pilasters within an outer frame of attached Corinthian columns, three of these windows having pediments - alternating segmental and triangular –the others, separating them, not. Solid lower walls to cut out traffic noise.

 

In view, St. Clement Danes with Wren’s recasing of the earlier church, a stage in the development of the two-storey form which ‘achieved its definition’[ix] at St. James Piccadilly. Then Gibbs’s upper stages improving the rather plain base in the Baroque style we’ve encountered next door, the square-to-octagon solution akin to ‘an Oriental pagoda, in symbol of the fragrant teas, the golden sugars and the spices come up the old Thames, by sail’. So enthused Sitwell.[x] For St. Mary he invoked a ‘cabinet’. Why not then a tea caddie? Plenty here.

 

Within, the Harrisons’ gold and silver pipes and trim against stunning black (at a guess) oak casing by Ralph Downes. Just the ticket. They blew me into raptures the day I unwrapped the new Pitkin Guide with its faithful colour spreads and set the standard there and then from which organ cases henceforward would be judged. A sober (Protestant?) counterpoint to the vegetative, curling, fluid, over- ornate marble and alabaster cliffs of never-ending pipes to be found in Germany and the Low Countries – Weingarten, Alkmaar, Haarlem, Groningen - whose designers – Silberman, Schnitger, van Hagerbeer, Gabler – in taking the art to its highest peak, overreached themselves in over-complexity, an overwroughtness that borders on the indigestible, consumptive, even claustrophobic. Here all is cool, calm and collected, reflected in the white and gilt of the vaults ensconced in a delicate filigree / fenestration of sharply carved foliage, elegant arcades chiming with the diagonally coffered apse. The swags and scrolls, the heraldic shields and cherubim.

 

Below the galleries, in ship-like immensity of wood panelling, volumes of the Roll of Honour behind glass, one with an entry for a scion of the Ashdowns whose stone at Cuddington is inscribed, with forgivable exaggeration, “One of the Few” . The log book, medals, photograph albums, forever consigned to the drawer.

 

So who needs the rhyme?

 

Here in ALDWYCH, three rather similar buildings: self-important, grey Portland, Empire associations, Empire style. Bush House by- Helmle & Corbett the most distinguished, cutting through the segmental island and placing facades to both Aldwych and The Strand. It makes the most of its modest frontage with a deep exedra sliced by an entablature on columns, itself supporting a sculptural group framed in the resulting lunette. A bit of Washington. The BBC have just moved out as I write and the view down from Kingsway must seem just a touch forlorn.

 

Furthest on, occupying the wedge that faces down Fleet Street, Australia House by Marshal MacKenzie & Son, assisted by J.S. Murdoch (Australia’s Chief Architect) curving convexly along its Aldwych flank, hence, with the colossal order of paired Doric columns, similarities to Unilever (→ 6.Holborn; see also Selfridges’s, Piccadilly Hotel, &c in the BOX → 16.Bloomsbury) all framed by rustication of the plinth continuing around the sides. The entrance is at the point of the wedge, a square opening framed with inset columns. The roof flamboyant French Empire, mansard with circular dormers sheathed in verdigris copper.

 

India House completes the triumvirate. Inevitably Herbert Baker and equally inevitably opened by George V - with a solid gold key. It spreads somewhat in the manner of the Shell Centre (→ 26.South Bank) and lacks the coherence of its neighbours but the details - such as window surrounds - worth inspection. The domed (on pendentives) entrance hall celebrates Ukil, Choudhury, Deb, Bama and Sen.

 

Twinings Tea Company, here since 1717, is well located, opposite these colonial relics (and the fragrant churches), if rather squeezed between blocks. Hard to miss the mosaic (on the entrance step) and open pediment with two Chinamen and a prone gilt lion[xii]. They also had their own bank, just along, still there but now Lloyds ‘Law Courts Branch’ – red sandstone with pink granite Doric pilasters, a second floor balcony supported over huge modillions and coloured earthenware[xiii]; ornate iron railings and more ironwork reaching its climax at the central doorway with gilt beehive. The top floor with bizarre forms reminiscent of Michelangelo in proto-Mannerist mode, but the real explosion occurs within, the vestibule a sumptuous extravagance of majolica mosaic and tiling, clustered shafts in Byzantine mauves and blues, baroque twisted barley columns[xiv] Compare Leighton (→ 28.Kensington) or Spencer (→ 20.Pall Mall). Or our cathedral. Harrods!

 

Next, another caddie, of sorts:

 

THE EAST INDIA COMPANY

The thread of India and Empire runs from Clive of India in Whitehall (the idea of another Great Imperialist, Lord Curzon) outside the offices of the Diplomatic Service and re-emerges all across London - from India House to the modern East India Company in Conduit Street to the East India Club in St. James, the site of Old East India House itself in the City, to a pub, a warehouse, East India Basin in the Docks, St. Nicholas Deptford and Morden College, Blackheath

 

Places where the connection can be found:

 

Clive of India statue, Whitehall (→ 3.Whitehall)

Foreign & Commonwealth Office (→ 3.Whitehall)

Twinings Tea Company (5.Strand - here!)

India House (5.Strand – also here!)

Old East India House (→ 8.City)

East India Arms (→ 8.City)

East India Warehouse, New Street, off Bishopsgate (→ 8.City)

Skinners Hall (→ 8.City)

Plantation House (demolished) (→ 8.City)

East India Basin in The Docks (→ 9.East)

St. Nicholas Deptford (→ 9.East)

Morden College, Blackheath (→ 9.East)

East India Warehouse, Cutler’s Gardens - W Jupp & Henry Holland 1798-1820 (→ 10.City 2)

Wanstead Park purchased by Josiah Child, Governor of the East India Company (→ 14b.NE)

Cannons – East India Company men settled in the area and built large houses (→ 14a.NW)

Derby House / Oriental Club (→ 18.West End)

East India & Public Schools Club, St. James Square (→ 20.St. James & Pall Mall)

Lord Lawrence Statue (Waterloo Place) , (→ 20.St. James & Pall Mall)

Lord Lawrence Memorial (Westm Abbey) (→ 2.Westminster)

Lord Lawrence bronze (Br Museum) (→ 16.Bloomsbury)

East India Company, 7 Conduit Street (→ 21.West End to M’bone)

Asia House, New Cavendish St (→ 21.West End to M’bone)

Tyburnia & S.P. Cockerell (→ 23.Paddington)

Victoria & Albert Museum – Tipu’s Tiger (→ 27.South Kensington)

 

n.b. Tonbridge school was founded in 1553 by Sir Andrew Judd, a local landowner, member of the Skinners Company as well as the East India Company, who was Lord Mayor of London more than once. Judd was also grand-nephew of Archbishop Henry Chichele (born in Higham Ferrers), the founder of All Souls College, Oxford - a fellow of All Souls still comes to Skinners' Day at the school each year and a school essay competition is judged by the College)

 

We end back down on the river, overlooking H.Q.S. Wellington (Hon Company of Master Marriners’ floating livery hall – saw action in WWII in the South China Sea 

 

Globe House is the post modern excrescence that replaced Elektra House after WWII bomb damage, appropriately the world HQ of BAT. It’s 1999, GMW (Gollins Melvin Ward, as was) and, despite the verdigris copper wavy penthouse roof, white stone effect finish and vast mullioned and transomed windows – all designed to placate its neighbour (see next↓) – merely clashes with everything around it (to coin a phrase[i]).

 

Slip back in time. Here were the old School Board Offices demolished 1929: Bodley & Garner, a design published in The Architect, May 10th 1873[ii]; but then much enlarged by Col. Robert Edis, he of the Great Central (→ 21.M’bone) and Great Eastern (→ 10.City2) Hotels, the original design mirrored about a central tower and with flanking pavilions. The end came in 1929, replaced by Herbert Baker’s undistinguished Electra House, in turn demolished[iii]. (see also Electra House, Moorgate → 10.City 2).

 

The Board had been responsible for building over four hundred schools across London, Edward Robert Robson its principle architect, the aim to make schools attractive, thus improving the general appearance of their localities. Criticised, the buildings were sturdy and practical. Many still in use.

 

Now the Swissotel (sic) occupies the Embankment front of a series of Brutalist layered blocks stepped down to accommodate (obliterate) the slope.

 

2 Temple Place on the end corner, with its own handy a K2 telephone box – John Loughborough Pearson’s lavish house for the Astors, which came into the lucky hands of the Society of Incorporated Accountants and Auditors in 1929. With large mullioned and transomed oriels, battlements and tall chimneys, limestone finish, all reminiscent of Sir Thomas Jackson’s earlier Examination Schools in Oxford. Exquisite lamp standards by William Silver Frith, interiors John Diblee Crace (also Cliveden, also Astor); silver gilt panels Sir George Frampton. The 35 foot high Great Hall has Tudor style panelled hammer beam ceiling, glass by Clayton & Bell, tapestries which hang below Nathaniel Hitch’s gilded frieze and a vast carpet that gulps up the floor and protects the parquet. [See Box on Venerable Halls → 6.Holborn]. Main staircase and gallery with carved newel posts and Rip Van Winkle frieze carved by Thomas Nicholl. 

 

BTW the Strand is worth £220.