Andrew Ashdown

LONDON NOW: An Odyssey Through the Nation's Capital

 

7. St. Paul's

 

We cross over from Unilever to Blackfriars Station the old rail bridge under solar panels (best seen from an LT Thames River ‘Bus’). The entrance, on the south side of the River, is the first such station on the South Bank for 122 years (crow Network Rail). The architects of this epoch-making thrust are Jacobs and Tony Gee . F.J. Ward’s twin-towered Turkish splendour was in its day also a first. So - a reincarnation of Ye Olde London Bridge? No, but the die is cast: the idea of something other than railway tracks or tarmacadam bearing Eliot’s eyes-down commuters is accepted, a barrier of sorts breached. Well, re-invented . It connects to the new City Thameslink Station – thence all the way to Bedford.

 

Just across, the celebrated Arts & crafts ‘Black Friar’, 174 Queen Victoria Street: opulence to vie with our Cathedral[iii]. 1873, Merrick, remodelled H. Fuller Clarke, around 1905. Whimsically varied pediments.

 

Come then to pediments more authentic - segmental, triangular, broken, open, plaster, stone and oak – at Apothecaries Hall , oldest Livery Hall in the City, with Great Hall, Court Room and Parlour more or less as built between 1668 and 1670, a post-Fire rebuild of Cobham House, the guesthouse of the Black Friars. Approach from the cobbled lane (Great Fire surviving), under the segmental broken pediment and Arms, along the inviting passage to the indecently picturesque courtyard in lovely lemon yellow, the white trims like piped icing, including the row of attic storey oculars, offset by the clock, and the arms dominant in the triangular pediment. The Tuscan colonnade at left is 1929, but you wouldn’t think it. Entrance Hall and main staircase just after the Fire, 1670, and Grand Hall with more lemon walling, under a thick icing of huge fluted oval, all mouth-wateringly off-set by the chocolate darkness of stained oak ‘reredos-like’ ensemble, the coat of arms again enshrined in broken pediment, with the luxury of doubled fluted Corinthian columns. Except for its 1823 steps and wrought-iron railings, the adjacent 'Elaboratory' need not concern us: drug manufacture, pharmacy, bell-jars, fortunately with separate entrance on Black Friars Lane. 

 

In truth, we’ve reached the City. At long last! The passageways, courtyards, unmistakable idiom of carved wood panelling and tortured plaster, barriers and footmen, undertow of vast wealth, assuaged by startling munificence. Corporate binging. Presage of what is to come.

 

We climb the hill and, mercifully free of the once obstructive archway, behold ...

 

But no, wait, first -

 

LUDGATE CIRCUS

To some the hub of the Ley Line through ‘London Stone’ (→ 8.City). Once a pale imitation of Piccadilly with its quadrants given over to shops and neon signs - all destroyed in the Blitz. The North-West is Ludgate House (not to be confused with its modern namesake next to Blackfriars Station) with a fine clock and splendid French-style lucarned dome, rather hidden from view. It’s hard not to turn here, pulled by the vortices. Next NE, Santander House, 100 Ludgate Hill, by SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, of whom more, much more, to come) between 1989 and ‘92 in a rather sarcastic (not ‘anxious not to offend’ as Pevsner puts it) Portland, granite and bronze. Beyond, 10 Fleet Place, again SOM, 1993 ‘modern Perp’ (black skeletal frameworking), occupying the site of the former Fleet Prison. And there was another here too, of course ....

 

We climb the hill and, mercifully free of the obstructive archway, behold ... but the emptied corner site (promising a suave frontage, much like Credit Lyonnais (→ 8.City) yields an unprecedented view - dome and Blind Justice.

 

Circumnavigating the building site and trying for the moment to ignore SOM’s insistent metal, we reach our first icon, The Old Bailey - 1902 Edwardian Baroque, E.W. Mountford, owing much to Wren, dome modelled to some extent on Greenwich Hospital[i], supporting Blind Justice by Pomeroy (see Holy Trinity, Sloane Street → 20.Chelsea). However, the twinned facade, with paired pedimented projections is Webb’s King Charles Block at Greenwich (→ 9.East) and, later, Ange-Jacques Gabriel at Place de la Concorde. Also, as we’ll see, Cavendish Square (→ 21.M’bone).

 

The interior waxes and wanes with more Pomeroy and also Moira, forgotten post-War efforts, the Wrenaissance coffered soffits and modillioned cornice low and imprisoning, chill tones of lime and cream. The extension by Donald Hanks, McMorran & George Whitby lends suave classicism in the manner of Manchester’s Town Hall extension, perhaps, though sober by comparison with that.

 

Yes, sorry, the ‘other one:’ Newgate Prison, that was it. 1770-80, George Dance II.Piranesi’s influence.

 

And we can’t exactly ignore, despite its being outside this route (I did warn you) - St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate the National Musicians’ Church (Henry Wood, organist), largest church in the City. Saxon provenance and C14th fabric but gutted in the Fire, rebuilt by Wren. Crusading name (Jerusalem ... ). The ‘bells of Old Bailey’ tolled for the condemned. It has most of what you expect from Wren: calm white interior, dark wood appointments, clear windows, gilded organ pipes but the Gothic exterior, sans clerestory, rib-vaulted aisles are the ‘differentiators’. There: that word. I used it!

 

Just along and the poignant Christchurch Newgate tower (Wren 1677-87) surveying its gutted remains. Aside from the tower, what might it have looked like? There were aisles and Corinthian columns. Just a shell now, with the 160 ft high sequence of square temples, the lower stage pseudoperipteral with bell-hole louvers in the spaces, repeated in the peripteral lantern stage and topped by a yet smaller cube and inverted amphora. I did warn you about terminology – hope you’ve read Summerson (‘Classical Language of Architecture’) by now. Or get the Pevsner Architectural Glossary app. The 12-room private residence sits on the chancel of the former Greyfriars Church, once part of Christ’s Hospital.

 

Behind the church, Merill Lynch is a stop on the City’s own modern architecture walk – Swanke Hayden Connell, replacing the old Post Office HQ and, before that, said philanthropic and bountiful Christ’s Hospital prior to its move to Horsham, itself a product of the Dissolution and of the Savoy. Wren and Hawksmoor designed, Pepys donated and Coleridge studied. The chapel was by John Shaw, 1825-29, London’s finest Tudor style building – like King’s College Chapel[iii] (another is Holy Trinity, Cloudesley Square → 12. NE Wedge).

 

The black cloaks and yellow socks of the Greyfriars one would scorn in days gone by ....

 

We turn again, into Warwick Lane for Cutlers Hall. Brick exterior by Tayler Smith, 1886-7, terracotta frieze by Benjamin Creswick (1853-1946), protégé of John Ruskin, portraying cutlery manufacture (what else?) if you can make it out. One observer finds an echo in the decoration of No.1 Poultry (→ 8.City).

 

Stationers Hall like Apothecaries, is one of the few ancient Halls remaining, again just after the Fire, of 1673, a suite of three inter-linked rooms to make a ‘sought after venue’ for the corporate bingers. The main hall of ‘gleaming oak flooring and carved oak panelling originating from the 1600s’, stained glass depicting Shakespeare, Caxton, St Cecaelia, Tynedale, Cranmer, Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville. Carved screen and minstrels’ gallery. All yours.

 

Still in sight of Christchurch tower, nip into the space that opens up: Paternoster Square is a mix of well-mannered modernity, Quinlan Terry Las Vegas leavened with Wren’s translated Temple Bar. Somewhat disorienting, even for those who don’t know. It’s another migratory arch (Marble, Euston, Wellington ....) but appropriately, serendipitously, now in the lea of a certain other work.

 

The Gryphon, Fleet, Paternoster .... well, we must by now be in the City proper? How many boundaries must we cross? You see, we’re still not there, really. Oh well.

 

The other piece here, a rather twee column by Whitfield Architects, somewhat superfluous, a mini version of The Monument (one thinks of Little Ben), complete with flaming urn which wants to be mistaken for a pineapple, subconsciously transposed from the twin Baroque towers above.

 

St. Paul’s Chapter House presents a riposte to all this sharp-angled, boxy stuff - new Stock Exchange et al - but is just as overwhelmed by .... what’s above ....behind (we will come to that .. promise). The give-away two-tone brick trimmed with Portland shout ‘Wren’ and, as happens, ‘1712’. Not as nice as the Deanery, though (just ahead →).

 

Moving around (the cavorting ‘presence’) we find cramped St. Vedast Foster Lane which, to the Laureate, is Wren’s subtlest, rising from flat Portland stone elevations and, though besieged, like all these churches, by the office blocks around, holding its own. The indication of shallow concave planes has the understatement of Soane or Lutyens but perhaps with greater exuberance, a result neither classical nor gothic but freely interpreted. Dykes-Bower (Lancing and Bury St. Edmunds) did a good job here with fittings from other churches enlisted to recreate the Wren idiom: black and white terrazzo floor against wood panelling, delicate white plaster ceiling, modern glass for once in harmony, and a rather neat Vicarage.

 

The latest hemming block is 150 Cheapside, a segment of glass by Michael Aukett, another must-see in the City’s modern architecture walk[i] as likewise One New Change, dubbed the Stealth Bomber, its creator Jean Nouvel, the low, chelicerate form protecting the soft underbelly of mammon from the wrath of .... St. Pauls (there, I’ve said it). It replaced the 1950s brick and Portland concave monolith that was the Bank of England. Enter the panning lens of the glass lift as the cathedral apse unvails the never-meant-to-be-seen roofline and naked plinth (with double row of scaffolding holes).

 

Not sure what happened to the fountain by Ernest Gillick or the mosaic by Boris Anrep. 

 

Across the road, big-boned 1 Wood Street – Fletcher Priest – cornering lower Wood Street below Gresham Street, another City leaflet 'must', this quote ‘dramatic lattice’ framework is but the abandoned outer shell of the three layered (as appears) ecdysial form which, in anthropological sleight of hand, conjures suave blue brise-soleils from large-frame steel grid from stone carapace –natural selection, colour signalling, adaptation, camouflage - in harmony with the Portland stone frontages. For variations on this biomorphic aesthetic, see Watling House at 33 Cannon Street (→ 8.City 1 – just here), or, as we saw, Wilkins’ self-deprecatingly morphed National Gallery (→ 4.Trafalgar). It all began (perhaps) with Pelli’s WFC in NYC - as has been said elsewhere.

 

Warning; we’re in danger of jumping ahead into our next (→ 8.City) route with St. Mary-le-Bow, Bow Bells House and 107 Cheapside.

 

So we press on, round, to St. Paul’s Cathedral Choir School. The ‘slender’ description in McKean & Jestico is perhaps inadequate; rather more provoking is this use of independent and rather bijou elements, white finish, thin vertical window bands, lead-sheath attic stories - to go with the upper stage of Wren’s St. Augustine’s Watling Street. From certain viewpoints, one of the buildings does actually appear to form a ‘nave’ to the marooned tower. The old school building in Carter Lane is in Pevsner’s ‘South Kensington’ style with sgraffito decoration. More help from Twitter: Sgrafitto (‘Welsh Caroline’); ‘muted tones’ (‘Londonographer’). Now a Youth Hostel (Welsh Caroline).

 

Eschewing (and trying not to trip over) the remnant of Old St. Pauls (how small things look when not built up – ever had that experience when building a house extension?) cross over and enter at the City of London Information Centre to get further confused and discombobulated (too many leaflets)- a suave insertion by architects Make, sharply cut stainless steel origami. We’re at the south flank of the cathedral – a vantage from whence to absorb at leisure the South Transept and cavorting dome. Best view, I think.

 

However, Bracken House calls, the old FT offices, with glass angular boxes, bay windows recalling Oriel Chambers Liverpool (worth looking up – otherwise check out 50 New Bond Street → 19.Mayfair). It was always a tour de force of inspired, idiosyncratic design and this re-coating honours precedent (though not as strictly as Yevele might). A strange ‘50s affair by Albert Richardson (I would visit on my delivery rounds, see → 5.Strand) remodelled (despite its pioneering listing) by Hopkins. The original brick form was of matched symmetrical elevations facing Queen Victoria and Cannon Street with equal impunity (entrances both sides). These facades betray a subliminal 2-4-1 classical division of storeys – plinth-podium-attic – within the ‘Victorian industrial’ idiom of brick and glass - much like his famous namesake’s icons in Chicago, the vertical lights with cast iron panels a la Behrens’ Fagus Works which the remodelling has taken on board and used exclusively in its bowed-out sides which seem almost to break the building apart in a way it was always threatening to. The FT itself moved to new offices off Southwark bridge (→31.South Bank).

 

There are churches to explore:

 

St. Nicholas, Cole Abbey Wren 1671-81, a large two storey Portland stone box, exposed to view on its corner site, with a grand array of straight-headed windows, ballustraded and with the north-west tower crowned by what Betjeman calls an ‘inverted trumpet’ – shall we make that ‘kazoo’? Now Presbyterian.

 

St. Mary Somerset is tower only, so no need to go in. The body of the church – apparently quite plain - was demolished in 1871 under the 1860 Union of Benefices Act – so was effectively redundant; somehow the tower got preserved. The tower is noted for its ‘Baroque’ pinnacles – actually this is entirely medieval thinking, just the form that’s contemporary: freely interpreted urns and obelisks reaching a medieval-sounding height of 120 feet.

 

Amid all these, the Salvation Army HQ – Sheppard Robson, 2004 – clangs a cymbal for modernity. I must say, one likes this – the tubular white frame behind the glass wall, angled fins; businesslike, but then, as Powell chirrups, ‘the devil should not have all the best tunes’, in Booth’s apt for any occasion quip.

 

Next door, 95 Queen Victoria Street by Sheppard Robson, is in equal measure forgettable.

 

It leads down to Millennium Bridge – 2002, Foster, Over Arup, Monberg & Thorsen, Anthony Caro, a perambulation commended by the view St. Paul’s. We do not cross as that would lead onto our other routes. A pity it’s all sorted now.

 

St. Benet, Paul’s Wharf Wren 1677-83 Escaped WWII damage so a rare example of pristine Wren. Simple brick box, with white quoins - Dutch appearance – the tower sits north-west and bears a lead dome and spire, continental fashion. A hipped roof with three rooflets are telling over the north aisle; large round arched windows with stone festoons (swags, garlands). Inside, the original box pews, wall panelling, reredos, font & cover, Gibbons pulpit, altar rails. Now the church of the Welsh Episcopalians.

 

Here, before the height restrictions were imposed, still blanches Faraday House, the 1933 telephone exchange with punning verdigris copper roof that’s always in the view of St. Pauls and adds nothing - unlike the former City of London School (→ 8.City).

 

St. Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe - Wren 1685-95, rebuilt Sissons, Shakespeare’s local for fifteen years, in appearance uncannily resembling Willen in Buckinghamshire (one of a handful of excursions into architecture by Wren’s tempestuous colleague Robert Hooke; see The Monument → 8.City) – it’s the same brick box with round windows and boxy tower but this one has aisles; the furnishings go well. Note the urns and wrought iron gates by one Sir Bannister-Fletcher (of whom more in a moment), a memorial to his naamgenoot father.

 

We turn and turn ....

 

St. Paul’s Deanery with ‘good interior[ii]’ the beautiful telling two-tone brick and white sash windows, heavy cornice, Wren, 1670 (even if by his masons) - a nice pad for the current venal occupant.

 

We’re back behind the Apothecaries. Following our route, snail-like, coiling spirally, curling inward, deeper. Back toward the Circus, once more: the helix – helicoidal, winding gyre - vortex – vortices – tornado – whirlpool – cyclone. Ammonite Tate Britain. Henry’s stair turrets. St. Paul’s has its own geometrical stairs. However the French influence did not go as far as the double helix at Chambord.

 

And now a curiosity. It’s well secluded - along Carter Lane then off a passage called Church Entry, thence to a Georgian alley and tucked in beside neat modern offices. An apparition of sorts: St. Anne’s Vestry Hall. The facade is by the man upon whose magnum opus so much of this exploration has depended, directly or indirectly. His achievement, let us recall, was to create a copious reference to the major architectural works, principally of Western Europe, in scaled drawings – thousands of them - photographs and summary text, thus furnishing a means of comparison - that is the key word - of building with building, style with style, period with period - what makes the book distinct. I have both the 11th and 17th editions; the former, 1943, battered, worn, cloth cover with gold inlay, airmail-light India paper faded cream with the endless drawings stencil-clear. The photographed models, ‘Tree of architecture’ and panorama of all Wren’s buildings. The ‘comparative’ approach, exhaustive and periodic, scoffed at now, served generations of architects and architectural students well. Now, we have this latest edition edited by dear old Cruikshank, alas, investing a new and inappropriate ethos, an exercise for which the Royal Arbiter of Taste I’m sure might find a phrase. These days there are more than enough 'coffee-table' books, with lavish photographs and dumbed-down text. There are also academic treatises a-plenty, pedalling esoteric viewpoints of an ephemeral and obsolescent kind. Bannister Fletcher is in peril of joining them, at the end of a long process of the progressive dilution of its contents. Sad indeed. The book deserves more. Like Pevsner's 'Buildings of England', it is a work which stands out of time.

 

Back to the Vestry. Rare indeed. We saw the memorial to his father at St. Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe; we will also come to B-F senior’s Jamaica Wine House → 10a.City2 and then his own Gillette Factory → 14a.NW). The facade is an exquisite miniature: segmental pedimented doorway, cartouched, a window above with its own segmental head, all within a frame of triangular broken pediment on strongly entasised Corinthian columns and blocked entablatures. Note also the pairs of small windows either side, dispensing with classical vocabulary (grammar, motifs...) if not proportion. In the manner of Soane, Lutyens, Voysey, Holden. Not QT.

 

Back on Ludgate Hill and St. Martin, Ludgate flush with the street as it climbs towards Temple Mount, the three bays well-windowed and the tower central (the church sideways on) rising between consoles to an octagonal stage, the pigeon (or health and safety?) wire creating (for the church-crawling generation’s shrunken, bespectacled eyes) the illusion of a bulbous Flemish dome, before tapering to a narrow spire, a medieval 158 ft. There are links with legendary King Cadwallo – or could it be Cadwallader of Tanganyika fame? Certainly, the Mbeya and Dar links resonate better. Thomas Hooke (q.v.) appears again – designing the nearby hall.

 

And now, at last, the main event.