Andrew Ashdown

LONDON NOW: An Odyssey Through the Nation's Capital

 

10. The City 2

 

Toward HOLBORN CIRCUS & CLERKENWELL

 

 

We’re back - after our river trip - unless you chose to skip it ... either way we disembark at The Tower and pick up where we left off. Confronting us, the dense mass of vertical glass and steel - clever smart material surfaces all a-glint. So dense a fabric as to appear impenetrable. No room for anecdote or reflection.

 

But here, Tower Hill , raises once more this question: where is the centre, the true centre, of the City? There are several possibilities. Of course, the ‘anchors’ are: The Tower, St. Pauls, the Guildhall and, for my money (or anyone else’s!) the Bank, bang in the middle, the hub of all the spokes, with its ring of venerable institutions: Mansion House, Royal Ex, Stock Ex, St Mary Wool, National Provincial and 1 Poultry. Plus a magistrates court.

 

But it’s no place to stop. Better here where the hard standing sweeps up before us. Or the steps of St. Pauls and Paternoster Square?

 

Guildhall Yard?

 

No. Tell you what. I think, if you want to tunnel into the heart of the place, it’s got to be enclosed, like a market. That’s the role Old St. Pauls played, with its double cloister and crumbling walls. But now, you have to pray or else pay up. So we turn to Leadenhall. That really is at the heart of the matter. A honeycomb, a hive, truly, in the very kernel of the City - Cornhill with its tiny alleyways. This tunnel of iron and glass.

 

If only! No! Too small, so quickly in and out. Doesn’t quite work. Those twee boutiques, chain beverage dispensers .... costermongers. Royal Exchange is the same and the plinth out front, while affording that view, is altogether exposed, tiny. Lacks all amenity. As for ‘Royal Exchange Buildings’, that’s a misnomer, of course. Peabody & Co but a mere passageway. No prospect of any kind. Guildhall Yard, well - to be a little pedantic – a mere courtyard. And not central. That’s where St. Pauls and The Tower also fall short. The Tower, though, with the Bridge and all, plenty of room. Good prospect ....

 

It begs the question of where the true soul of London lies: on the river bank – a muddy, cold, uninviting place – or in the little squares and passages we seek?

 

Piccadilly Circus or the Embankment? You choose.

 

Some others to consider:

 

Finsbury Square - one could be in Buenos Aires, San Francisco, Birmingham, Barcelona (Plaza Cataluña) but not the City. That is its charm.

 

Finsbury Circus, on the other hand, most definitely is. Hundred foot flanks hem one in. Formality, stiff upper lips everywhere. Ties, suits. And a tiny patch of green. Okay once you’re in, a place for a thermos and sandwich. But is that allowed?

 

West Smithfield - like an ex-colonial, tropical rail station. Too big to be provincial. To quiet to be metropolitan. So quiet! Lacks all the appurtenances. Were it a station then the reality of taxis, buses, porters, crush of commuters, signage, announcements, vendors, stalls would be unbearable. And the permanent scaffolding (that’s here, though). And shops. Ugh! No, thank goodness. It’s abandoned, genteel, an anomaly. The lengthy cast iron roofs and domes overlooking the inexplicable dusty circle and blighted trees. The broken curbs. The open sky, that edge of town feel.

 

We’ll be there anon ....

 

10a. The Tower to Bishopsgate

 

And here the Kentish ragstone layer erupts, big-time, into the ramparts and upperworks of The Tower (see previous chapter  → 8.City 1) and all about the City in places lost now to view and memory. The battered forms, the palimpsest of historical, archaeological layers, the inescapable sense of past in the graffiti of the condemned, in the dumb horror of Traitors Gate and the silent, concealing walls - from which view the crush of counting houses, spires, scaffolding, cranes. And all before, the calm river and theatricality of Tower Bridge.

 

Tower Hill Square offers an informal, serendipitously unscripted meeting place, unplanned piazza, the outcome of tergiversatious, convoluted evolution producing an urban arena with a veracity and compulsion that eludes those instrumental, self-conscious, premeditated tracts at More London or Broadgate. The cobbled slope against the staggered ancient ramparts, an amorphous, jumbled space, for sure, but revamped and conformed by Stanton Williams, the boatless slipway and self-effacing colonnade of kiosks in repudiating contrast with Foster’s glass wobble, investing Tower Hill Tube with a genius loci; giving room for Methodism’s ghostly voice echoing silent in the gloaming or at first light, recorded, through some yet to be discovered digitised conceit, by these very stones .... Try to imagine. I see Dan Cruikshank at London Bridge.

 

The Tower Shoppe nestles within the Victorian brick of Anthony Salvin’s Pumphouse, more gothicisation (though not BTW Windsor, which received its frills from others → 32.West).

 

Back to those smothering Cnidarian masses of Tower Place threatening to consume all into their gelatinous innards. Pass up the opportunity to slide under the filmy filament which links the globular gloops.

 

And what a grouping!

 

Facing the Tower the Port of London Authority, Beaux Arts Edwardian, Edwin Cooper, who did the NatWest Bank, Poultry: the same recessant front, this one nichéd in the mass of stone, all for show (and see also Freemasons Hall → 6.Holborn). An impressive pile, no question.

 

Trinity House regulates the nation’s harbour pilots and lighthouses; by Samuel Wyatt, 1792-04, rather neat, crushed by the PLA, of Portland stone with rusticated base, the upper floor divided in three: central zone inset and framed by pairs of flat pilasters, further subdivided in three by two Ionic columns, an arrangement mirrored in the outer bays by having windows inset with identical but proportionately smaller, inset columns. The overall proportions echo the Queen’s House, Greenwich (→ 9.East).

 

The former Royal Mint gives its name both to the street and the area (the Metropolis’s predilection for naming individually every tiny neighbourhood) of 1807-09 by James Johnson, then Smirke, one of the capitals’ most underrated yet perfect buildings, redundant since the move to Wales. A Portland stone palace front, Smirke’s broad central ‘blind’ portico, with base of channelled rustication and suave proportions all place it worthily beside Trinity House and the PLA, matching them in repose and ‘rightness’, despite the malidadi denticulation of the cornice.

 

The 1920s Mercantile Marine Memorial is a rather one-off Lutyens (except in its characteristic whimsicality): bronze plaques to the fallen masquerading as rusticated ashlar, St. Paul’s Covent Garden-style modillioned pediment, albeit broken by an arch, all rather uncomfortably prescient of the Palladian flightiness of ‘Cutie QT’, while the abstract arrangement of volumes atop is a sublimated version of its vaster contemporary, Thiepval.

 

We must stop by Seething Lane where lived Pepys upon joining the Navy Board (its offices here) after the Restoration. The 1983 bust is in the gardens on the right, also a plaque and, round the corner, a street, but ....

 

I am a victim of that pointillist method of biog sketching which Tomalin attributes to Pepys - snatches of conversation to bring out character, rather .... the mosaic methodology.

 

Anyhow, we cross to ...

 

St. Olave, Hart Street Pre-Fire, another WWII victim, this time rebuilt by E.B. Glanfield, one sees first its Tudor three-light clerestory and rubble tower propping a 1732 brick upper stage with restored belfry. A ‘country church’ in Betjemanese, describing the sense of enclosure afforded by the wall with segmental arched entrance with skulls. It is, of course, a great benefaction in this most tightly wrought of places.

 

As we head deep into the financial quarter, we stop first at Fenchurch Street Station the line to Willesden Junction, kick-starting the development of Kilburn and about. It’s tucked in here somewhere, behind, around, under, all but smothered. The giant segmental pediment perfectly expresses the roof, in reverse to Kings Cross, solid instead of hollow; odd because, if we go back to medieval architecture, then the English tradition has been to mask interiors behind screen fronts, of course (Salisbury, Wells &c. and hence St. Pancras Station) – in contrast with the ‘logical’ exposition of the île de France. Doubly ironic then that it’s now all but a sham: commercial office air rights space, platforms rendered into another Euston. Revenge served cold upon the Laureate.

 

On the Board:

Fenchurch Street Station £200, today’s value: £700m.

 

Above the platforms, in Cooper’s Row, rises a tangle of buildings of which only 1 America Square makes vertical impact – New York Retro Deco by RHWL while the Grange City 2002 by Buchanan Architects burrows through to offer guests views of the trains through toughened triple glass.

 

Archaeological site alert: Roman Wall hereabouts!

 

The East India Arms, another East India Company relic (coming up, East India House) a place at which to gaze at sepia mezzotints and bromides of Empire from a bar stool with jar of ‘Spitfire’. On we go. There’s far too much here .... we shall never get it done. We shall sink into a quagmire and fail to emerge, fail to resume our journey. But we have places to go! How will we ever finish? There is a danger of the grand odyssey stalling here in a Sargasso Sea .... vortex .... doomed like the Marie Celeste. So many buildings crushed in here it’s hard to breathe – metaphorically (which is all that counts).

 

Take a breather and nip in behind the pub (and still by the station)

 

Lloyds Register of Shipping this nigh impossible shoe-in: three blocks tapering with atria between, squeezed like bellows, pumping light and air as well as people yet finding room for the Old Lloyds Register of Shipping by Colcutt, 1899-1901 ‘Arts & Crafts Baroque’[iv] with a sumptuous Committee Room decorated by Gerald Moira. Such antiquated spaces are a bit of a fad in these parts. The service cores (plural) appear quite independent and the whole thing a continuation of where they left off in 1 Lime Street (coming up). Despite the disingenuousness of ‘function dictating form’, these service towers, with their over-engineered lifts and Beaubourg colour schemes, are ultimately the building’s visual statement and I have to say achieve, in their verticality, glassiness and juxtaposed deployment, an elegance that eluded the said late ‘70s icon (which, incidentally, has the same number of floors: fourteen).

 

Offices, 69 Leadenhall Street (corner of Fenchurch) is a Terry Farrell in his enfant terrible phase (Michael Graves of t’North) a gratuitously shocking incursion with Stirling’s elided cylinder (1 Poultry → 8.City 1) and Battenburg stripes. Not sure precisely who came first – this is 1987; 1 Poultry was 1994-8 but designed 1986 – a lengthy genesis stretching to when Pevsner published in 1997).

 

But here a still more venerable relic, buried in Swiss Re House (1986-7, GMW) on the corner across from Farrell , i.e. the junction of Leadenhall and Mitre (the clue in the name) an arch of the Augustinian Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate one of the largest complexes in the medieval City, of which various fragments are scattered around the neighbourhood, evidencing aisles, chapels, cloisters, other ranges, here the south presbytery chapel arch, incorporated with the entrance hall of the new building. One of the first Augustinian houses to be established in England and the first house in London to be dissolved by the commissioners (1532).

 

In its ruins was built St. Katherine Cree pre-Fire then 1628-31, an odd survivor this .... ‘transitional’ - you see the body of a medieval town church with low clerestory but then inside the bossed vault and Tuscan columns. The SW cupola was added in the C18th. Supposedly the least spoilt church in the City, as lying east, upwind, of the Fire. According to Friar[vii] ‘Gothic survival’ – one of a precious crop including St. Mary Warwick and the ‘errant Commonwealth’ Staunton Harold. Miscegeny is nothing new.

 

The Great Synagogue in Duke’s Place was destroyed in the war having been built – in its first incarnation - after the Jews re-crossed their Red Sea around 1690; a second home came in 1722, enlarged by George Dance the Elder, 1766, now termed explicitly 'The Great Synagogue’; then, between 1788 and 1790, the third, which stood until the Blitz, the architect James Spiller, style a derivation of Adam. It was redecorated and repaired in 1832, in 1852 by John Walen and again, with renovations, in 1899 and 1930. May 10, 1941 was its nemesis. No more the coffered ceilings, galleries and great apse with octagonally coffered half dome, paired Corinthian marble columns under entablatures. Now we have to be content with Bevis Marks (below ↓).

 

St. Botolph, Aldgate 1741-44, rebuilt George Dance the Elder, and decorated by Bentley within. Black brick, white quoined, west tower and steeple - tall but clumsily proportioned (I agree with J&W) which crushes the body of the church, the pediment flimsy and accidental, lantern stage too big, spire crudely stuck on and indifferently profiled, realised in a cream stone in inexplicable contrast to the tower. Jarring. Also Hawksmoor influence.

 

Unavoidably present behind the church is the blue bouncy (wobbly) St. Botolph Building, House, whatever .... St. Botox Development: ‘blue reflections’ a keen Google Earther calls it. Grimshaw carbuncular. But preferable to the giant Minerva that was intended. Maybe we have to thank the Romano-British Eagle which here rose again.

 

Now two easily overlooked items by one Arthur Wm Cooksey:

Sir John Cass College, Jewry 1899 and Sir John Cass School Aldgate,1908. Sir John Cass MP (1661-1718) left a bequest towards providing schooling for the poor of the Ward of Portsoken in 1710. An inscription plaque in the assembly hall says 'for ye education of ye poor children born in this Ward, that they might be early instructed in ye true Religion according to ye Principles and Practice of ye Church of England'. The school is a fine example of Wrennaissance. The C19th edifice hides many a C17th and C18th fitting, ceiling or other treasure , incl. Roubiliac. The painted room was brought from a house formerly within the possession of the Foundation School, in 1905.

 

St. Andrew Undershaft pre-Fire; 1520-32 Perp. Numinosity still flickers but this is not so much ruin as ruined (as J&W have it by use as a ‘teaching centre’ and the crazed obsession with reaching ‘the young’ (whoever they are). More Kentish Rag extruded from subterranean strata. One can’t avoid the ‘guidey’ titbit here, you know, the maypole story. In my case unsolicited, from a charming septuagenarian while on a City Open Day crawl.

 

We head on now to Leadenhall Market, in order to approach to greater advantage the glut of high-rises - from which it offers vital escape, visual antithesis, riposte. In place of the ubiquitous annihilation of space hereabouts, it cuts through to provide leg-room, under glass suspended by crimson painted ironwork. Secluded, peaceful, resonant (literally, with a golden piano in three summer weeks of 2012). Horace Jones, again (i.e. with Billingsgate and Smithfield).

 

The Roman Basilica was here, extending from St. Michael’s Alley (Jamaica Wine House, &c) and Whittington Avenue, A.D.85-140, 547 x 172 feet, longer than St. Paul’s is today. A second basilica, perhaps in excess of 300 ft, graced Tower Hill in the later Roman phase of c.A.D. 350, some argue London’s first Christian cathedral, with central nave and double aisles[vi]. A fragment, the base of an arch, can be viewed in a barbershop (as one is still wont to call them: this is Nicholson & Griffin).

 

We nip along to more metallic display but in the opposite vein, for the Lloyds Building, London’s answer to the Pompidou in Paris (and inspiration for the idea-famished Foster in his Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, Hong Kong ) offers no relief. And while neighbouring Leadenhall might have had a small influence the vault is surely Paxton. The apotheosis of the ‘honest’, function- before-form school of thought, all insides out (like the suggestion put to Madonna by Dennis Pennis - which surely in turn inspired Robbie Williams). Surely, there is a case for keeping some things out of sight?

 

Do not all charms fly

At the mere touch of cold philosophy?

There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:

We know her woof, her texture; she is given

In the dull catalogue of common things.

Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine -

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender-person’d

Lamia melt into a shade.

 

This is no place for dawdling: I once set off an alarm when attempting to shelter from the rain on an inviting external flights of steps. Do not touch! This was, admittedly, on a Sunday. The metallurgical innards were as hostile in behaviour as their appearance had forewarned. Something of a habit (see Museum of London ↓ below).

 

Opposite is the ex- Midland Bank, 140 Leadenhall Street - 1929, Lutyens (another of his facade jobs – see Grosvenor House Hotel → 19.Mayfair). It’s contemporary with the big one on Poultry (→ 8.City 1), the hallmark geometry and unclichéd openings, the stepping away behind aedicules and cupolas.

 

Beneath all this, somewhere, the foundations of the much aforementioned East India House designed by Theodore Jacobsen and completed by Henry Holland only to be replaced by something altogether grander by Jupp in 1799 and yet still further enlarged by C.R. Cockerell and William Wilkins.

 

This ‘200 foot long Monster of Leadenhall’ also contained a museum with ‘Hindu idols in silver and gold, Hindu and Goorkha swords, gauntlets from Lahore, the sword of the executioner attached to the palace of the King of Candy (taken at the capture of Candy), a shard from the ship ‘Farquharson’ containing the horns of a fish called the monodon; the largest horn had penetrated through the copper sheeting and outside lining into one of the floor timbers; an emblematic organ (a tiger on a man), contrived for the amusement of Tippoo Sultan. Surya, the Sun, in his seven-horse car. Buddhist idols, and relics. A perfumed gold necklace. The state howdah of Durgan Sal, usurper of Bhurtpore. Full-length portrait of the famous Nadir Shah. Roman tessellated pavement found in front of the East India House - human figure reclining on a tiger. Babylonian inscription on stone, as sharp and perfect as the day it was cut. Bust of Mr. Colebrooke, by Chantrey. The coins (a most valuable collection under the care of Prof. H.H. Wilson) can only be seen by special permission. Hoole, the translator of Tasso; Charles Lamb, author of Elia; and James Mill, the historian of British India; were clerks in the East India House. "My printed works," said Lamb, "were my recreations - my true works may be found on the shelves in Leadenhall-street, filling some hundred folios."

 

(see BOX: THE EAST INDIA COMPANY → 5. Strand)

 

Like the Duke of York HQ and the Bank, a product of the Napoleonic Wars.

 

Old Tipu was moved to the V&A (→ 26.South Kensington) where its disembodied growl lures and entices bemused if unfazed school parties. Curiously, the Bacchus Riding a Tiger mosaic (now in the BM) was one of the finds from the demolition. How circular is that?

 

We’ve stumbled into the Willis Building – the ‘Crustacean’ as one is wont, or ‘Sherkin’ – untypical of Foster – a rather frustrating, stepped profile of sliding concavities: coruscate and crepuscular. It takes genius (to coin a phrase) to combine unfulfilled height and lack of horizontal impact at the same time.

 

In here, somewhere, difficult to find – entirely boxed in, in fact, in the shadow of the Gherkin – is the Spanish & Portuguese Synagogue, ‘Bevis Marks’ (just mentioned), of 1700-01 by Joseph Avis. Jones & Woodward are dismissive[iii] but a unique Georgian survivor, ‘superior Non-Conformist Chapel’ in the words of Pevsner (or Bradley, who thinks it worth illustrating)[iv] Well, to add one’s tuppence worth - a numinous and allusive sanctuary of walls wainscoated by history, an interior close to Wren, galleried, with requisite boards and reading desk, for reredos the great oak Echal or Ark of the Covenant with scrolls of the Tora, all about the prosperity of mahogany, gold and silver, marble and scagliola. The name is a corruption of ‘Buries Marks’ – the burial limits for the town house of the Abbot of Bury St. Edmunds (another Diocesan in London – also Winchester, Ely, Salisbury – and the Skinners Company is connected with Archbishop Chichele via his grand-nephew Andrew Judd / Judde, founder of Tonbridge School, Lord Mayor, Skinner, member of the East India Company; there is a connection between Chichele’s All Souls and Tonbridge School to this day - see also his wonderful tomb in St. Helen’s Bishopsgate (coming up↓). Also, land lay within Parish of St. Ethelburga (also below ↓).

 

Now to address what’s looming overhead – and already acknowledged. The onslaught of the ‘latter-day Scott’ is unending; however, The Gherkin is likely to become his signature. It may be churlish to recall that this was not his own idea. One ought also, in passing, note the contemporary Torre Agbar, Barcelona (Jean Nouvel, who did One Exchange Place →7.St. Paul’s). The intersecting steel ribs (I suppose we must call them – they’re neither mullions nor transoms - there’s no real precedent) have an uncanny, if presumably unintended resemblance to that plastic netting you get with supermarket veg. No comment on the priapic form: enough of carping. A suave statement, all told, it cannot be denied. Neat in shiny black and double-glaze laminate, cool and slick as a car promo. A touch porno, probably. Does it outdo St. Paul’s? Was it thus intended? Is Foster the late C20th early C21st Wren? No, no and no (to quote his one-time advocate). G.G. Scott or, more kindly, Paxton. He would undoubtedly have been on Alfred Waterhouse’s side in the ‘professionalism versus art’ debate of the 1880s and ‘90s: the contention by the then RIBA President (architecture is two-thirds business, one third art) has a coldly Fosterian ring.

 

The cucumber, whatever, replaced the Baltic Exchange, demolished after the IRA bombing in 1992 but not before a protracted campaign to keep the old thing. We needed you, Sir John! The building, by T.H. Jones & W. Wimble, had one of the finest Edwardian commercial interiors, with grand domed exchange hall panelled in marble and mahogany, lit by stained glass. After the demolition, the entire Portland stone facade was salvaged along with 16 marble columns weighing 4 tonnes each, together with plaster interiors complete with classical mouldings depicting sea monsters and mermaids; no-one knows where they are now. 

 

Incorporate in the calcified, fossilferous limestone all about, no doubt.

 

There’s no access to the observation floor of the Gherkin: shades of GPO, Mittal .... et al, ad infinitum. Across the way, the now stylistically obsolescent Tower 42 (‘NatWest’ when built), another signature for another wannabe-Wren, our old friend The Colonel. With an inexplicably drab profile (someone helpfully volunteered a ‘bowler hat’) the whole thing is hoisted high above street level, where only can it be appreciated. The plan is a dull echo of a Gothic clustered shaft, surreptitiously insinuating the company’s logo (à la Twin Towers, Kuala Lumpur) – a pointless task (Google earth surfers and fellow aviators on this journey aside). The novel idiom and richness of materials (brown glass, glinting mullions) made an impression at the time. It was right for the seventies, which it just missed.

 

In here somewhere

City of London Club, 19 Old Broad Street - Philip Hardwick 1833-34[i] – the cream paint and strange blind attic story takes one to Covent Garden and the Royal Opera House, for some reason (→17. Covent Garden. Within, ‘Adamesque’ plasterwork by Waring & Gillow.

 

At Tower 42’s feet (more or less, along with everything else) cowers Gibson Hall - a banking hall, just that, but this is egging it. The acme, very template, of what a banking hall should be - “A British Bank” as Mr. Banks had it. Formerly the National Prudential, now part and parcel of Tower 42, i.e. the NatWest, a convex form of dense relief panels and ‘sky-puncturing statuary’ (Jones & Woodward[ii]) by a man who knew about bank design when that was still a novelty. He articled under Joseph ‘Cab’ Hansom and helped Barry at the Houses of Parliament. He also did Todmorden Town Hall; no relation, however (that I can establish) with James Glen Sivwright Gibson of the Middlesex Town Hall (→2.Westminster). Nor the Gibsons of Halifax and Hutton Buscel.

 

And so, in the blink of an eye, to Heron Tower, till recently tallest in the Square Mile[iii] and, after Canary Wharf, Cheesegrater and Shard, the whole Metropolis, in profile almost indistinguishable from the NatWest – to which it sits too close, the profiles oddly euphonious in their uninspiring utilitarianism: add Terminal Four Heathrow, Wembley Stadium and the Olympic venue – it’s that man again! Well, no, not this time. No; it’s rather odd that we should be giving plaudits to the latter day G.G. Scott (for the Gherkin) and find ourselves criticising KPF – Kohn Pederson Fox. Quotidian, functional, fit for purpose in its metallic, ‘unfinished’ idiom, economical with the actualité. Not even a proper elucidation of the structure in the manner of the Lloyds Building (one has to concede that much to that charming progenitor of the ‘scaffolding’ genre) but rather this half-baked windrow-dressing.

 

So if we could climb these towers what would we see? A crush of glass and concrete – and we can point out all those eminences with glee. But, as I’ve already said- I have a thing about that. About labelling, that is. Once labelled, things quickly become, like minority groups (racial, religious, &c) or classes (chattering, criminous) - their labels. And lose something. You are apt to wonder what they were before being tagged. Did they even exist? Lake Victoria, Everest (before Speke and the RGS) Once, gazing from the top of a Lakeland fell (Blencathra, if we must – and, for the record, a May Bank Holiday) I stared into the utter stillness, the late afternoon sky reverberating over the mirror of Thirlmere, illuminating the billowing grassed flank of Helvellyn and Stybarrow Dodd, plunging into chiaroscuro the steep furrowed hummocks of some wooded hill below and, in the far, far distance, washing and merging the receding lines of striated ridges into the blue vortex. And it hit me: that all these little furrows, prominences, undulations – these irradient inclines and sudden spurs – had names, little names, given them by ..... by who? Fervent sorts, prey, in fits of self-indulgence, to anthropomorph and personalize anything and everything they find and so attach to their own station. Yet to me, there, at that moment, these were – and I am sure the hills would second the motion – anonymous undulations, prominences, heather and gorse, bank and forest, fractured rock and brackish water - just that. Utterly sublime. The precious nomenclature rendered superfluous in the sheer immensity.

 

Definitely. Things become their labels and are thereby diminished. Lose their uniqueness, reality, essence - soul. Rather than what’s actually there we read, into the prospect or object, only that which is second-hand, dry, desiccated.

 

And a cucumber. Mesh-wrapped.

 

Just visible here (without need for visit) 20 Gracechurch Street (until recently, 54 Lombard Street) – by GMW, 1992, the machine ethic again, but ‘Retro Deco’, the Chrysler without its spike, a ‘30s radio set (take your pick). Now encased below in Portland stone by ORMS. That, of course, omits Nos. 39-40 Lombard Street which is by that ‘Cook & Larkins’ of Victorian partnerships, Frederick John and Horace Francis, 1866-68. The most ornate and Italianate of buildings, fully worked out, recessing entablatures to every floor, carving by F.G. Anstey, to every surface. Paired windows above - Venice Il Canale Grande: Palazzo Rezzonico or Pesaro.

 

And here was London’s first great open space, the Public Forum a gravelled area located at the ‘T’ junction of Greychurch & Fenchurch Streets, in the first iteration of the Roman city, around A.D. 50.

 

I feel the Horse Guards at my feet - the Flood Plain gravels of Tower Hamlets, Limehouse and Bow ....

 

We turn sure-footed to the Commercial Assurance, now Aviva Tower, London’s Seagram - Gollins Melvin Ward. Allinson[vii] says GMW introduced two key forms to the City from New York: (1) the podium and slab, à la SOM’s Lever House: Marathon House (→ 21.Marylebone, though Fountain House → 8.City 1, by W.H. Rogers, may have just beaten it); and (2) the suave bronze tower and piazza after Mies. Well, it’s certainly suave, a piece de resistance of bronze-to-grey anodised aluminium (replaced after the IRA bombs), exhibiting Miesian restraint, exquisite detailing and the masterly handling of proportion and finishes – a rarity at the time. Odd that it should happen a year after Palumbo’s Mansion House Tower proposal was rejected.

 

This is all overwhelmed now by the so-called Cheesegrater at 122 Leadenhall which, on completion is, true to form, significantly different to the many models and computer generated images which have bombarded cyberspace for the past few years. Brown, not silver (a bronze cheesegrater?) And all that yellow ducting. A solecism too, its shape defended solely in terms of opening up views, actually blocks them (seen from anywhere west). And without the Pinnacle (below ↓) easily the tallest in the City, offering as its profile, what? A straight edge. The fact that the many higher floors are ludicrously small is of little import to us onlookers.

 

Mention must also be made of 150 Leadenhall– more suavity, with SOM the possible inspiration this time, their Manufacturers Trust Company Bank, 5th Ave/43rd New York, of 1951-54 (which incidentally also engendered the giant Chase Manhattan tower).

 

P&O House (‘Indosuez’) was the horizontal counterpoint to Aviva, completing what was a plaza, or piazza. A headache when it came to demolition, as the method of construction – floors suspended from a concrete core - required removal bottom up. Well, now resolutely eviscerated but for what? An abandoned concrete core with idle jacks. The priapic analogy is hard to avoid, the frustrated Bishopsgate Tower (or ‘Helter-Skelter’, correctly Pinnacle) – Kohn Pederson Fox who did the Heron Tower (↑).

 

Meanwhile, KPF will have to be content with ‘The Scalpel’ 52-54 Lime Street, HQ for W.R. Berkley (insurance – as someone said, ‘natch’) between St. Andrew Undershaft, the Crustacean and Lloyds Buildings. Due for completion 2017.

 

And also in this LEADENHALL TRIANGLE (estate agentese), Make Architects' 34-storey 40 Leadenhall Street scheme for Henderson Global. More of the ‘three vertical slices’ genre started by Rogers (we’ll come to this in a mo).

 

100 Bishopsgate by Allies & Morrison & Wood Bagot (AWMB) - 40 stories, 172 m, is just begun (as I pass the hoardings with the sales shoppers at Christmas, New Year 2012) at once the most anonymous and quotidian of additions to the City’s vertical profile, with only this wind-deflecting splay, or flange, of note.

 

While these two, despite having the sixties look of the departed, have somehow survived:

99 Bishopsgate – canted sides, blue glass and pronounced vertical aluminium fins – still there. Seifert, a mini Vickers Tower (see also Parker Tower → 17.Covent Garden) 

 

and

 

6-8 Bishopsgate – also still there - so dull it defies description. It’s by GMW, 1981, a sort of reduced Aviva / Seagram. Or Dashwood House (near Liverpool Street Station – we’ll come to in a mo).

 

Now You See Them ...

 

Falling towers ....

 

1 Angel Court – brown blocky affect created by bays in Dakota marble and smoked glass ‘70s style –still there at 30 Throgmorton Street, very mid-70s (like QWest Tower in Denver) and with a makeover by Fletcher Priest

 

But definitely gone:

Drapers Gardens – a memorable, convex green form, one of The Colonel’s best, with pinched-in ends and altogether like 1 West India Quay in Canary Wharf. Demolished in 2007 and replaced by a lower, stepped development by Foggo Associates (below ↓)– rather forgettable but that is deliberate – intending to create space between St. Pauls and the rest of the City skyline

Limebank House – The Colonel - beige box, canted sides - with a hat

Moor House – the bronze latecomer on London Wall – now given way to a new snail-like glass thing which is one word ‘Moorhouse’ ( see below ↓)

20 Fenchurch Street –William H. Rogers, to make way for the new ‘Walkie Talkie’- as we saw (→ 8.City 1)

Royex House – another by ‘The Colonel’ – London Wall type ... block

122 Leadenhall – the old P&O Building that went with Commercial Assurance (Aviva); its successor is the ‘Cheesegrater’

 

And, whilst we’re at it, there’s more along the river (→ 26. South Bank): Southwark Towers, New London Bridge House, RHM Rank Hovis MacDougall .... Kings Reach Tower may yet survive being skinned alive (a fate more horrifically true of Venice). And:Pembroke House – Croydon - 19 stories 70m (→ 32.South) Falling .... falling .... unreal

 

King’s Reach is another by ‘The Colonel’. Well, we must pay tribute. Reubin ‘Richard’ Seifert – a contender for the title of ‘Latter-day G.G. Scott’, in terms of sheer prolixity, ubiquity: NatWest, Int’l Press Centre, Centre Point, Mitre House, 50p (Croydon), Sheraton Park Tower, Tolworth Tower, Space House .... Euston. Not pretty, all told. You need that inverted, lateral appreciation, that wry sense of humour of the New Brutalist advocates .. of whom I begin, oddly, to count myself one.

 

We turn for refreshment to:

 

Drapers Hall Throgmorton StreetThe finest Victorian livery hall, with opulent interiors by Herbert Williams 1866-70, ‘to rival the richest Mayfair saloons’. Nowadays, the lighting – as is now the norm, reaching apotheosis at the Olympic Stadium – is all, illuminating the Shakespearian scenes by Draper and purpling the ‘clerestory’ of arches which cut into the elliptical ceiling, St. Martins-style, the ceiling itself in sections in the manner of The Banqueting House while all around march the procession of coupled columns in chocolate marble and gilt on green marble plinths - all of which reminds one of the demolished Carlton House. But outside, spare a moment for the wonderful rusticated, arched entrance with bowed-in open pediment pierced by the royal coat of arms and supported on column tops held by Atlantases by Pegram.

 

And talking of survivors, now a pair of medieval ones, connected to a complex network of ‘intersecting lanes’ and alleyways:

 

St. Michael Cornhill The pinnacled Gothic tower and crammed entry draw us to a surprising interior – sky-blue cross-vault, arcade after Brunelleschi, coffered and gilded, smooth columns, ornate alabaster and marble Italian Baroque reredos by Scott, rashly rethinking Wren. Betjeman suggests the freely interpreted Gothic tower (Wren’s office, Hawksmoor’s design, 1718-24) provoked the cavalier approach. St. Peter upon Cornhill Dark red brick tower, green copper dome and spirelet, the Gracechurch Street east end is an odd assortment of circular and round-headed windows with voluted pediment. The Jamaica Wine House in St Michael’s Alley (or by St. Michael’s Churchyard) is that rare thing, a work by Bannister-Fletcher Senior, father of Sir B-F. Time for a résumé:

 

The Bannister Fletchers:

 

Bannister Fletcher, Snr (1833-99)

Jamaica Wine House, St. Michael’s Alley (1885)

Sir Bannister Fletcher (1866-1953)

St. Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe: wall with urns, as memorial to BF Snr 1901

Gillette Factory 1905

City of London School, War Memorial 1919

Bannister Fletcher & Sons

St. Anne’s Vestry Hall, 1936

 

All these alleyways really help to resurrect the old place, allow one to drift for a moment, become that now accepted, respected lost soul, the flaneur. To see how the secular side of things, (merchants’ houses in particular) once appeared, pop across to the V&A (→ 27.South Kensington) where the elaborate oaken oriels of Sir Paul Pindar’s House, pre-Fire, 1599, is preserved, currently sans glass (looking a bit like the organ in Christchurch Spitalfields).

 

But mostly we rely on churches to preserve the street frontage as was. St. Edmund, King & Martyr is rather satisfying in that regard, two storied, three bayed (as if to indicate aisles) strongly quoined, with concave supports to the centrally placed tower and lead octagon, convex steeple - St. Nicholas Cole Abbey type. This is the liturgical ‘west’ but the compass point is south and said buttresses, consoles – not scrolled, voluted – hide the generous full width roof, a device derived from examples going back to, well, let’s say, Santa Maria Novella, Florence. Within, lo and behold, a bookshop! But it is a church, despite appearances. One now sees the lack of aisles despite the indication thereof with windows. 

 

We press on, the cricket bringing no relief.

 

St. Helen’s Bishopsgate in one of the most unexpected and charming corners of the City, the twin gables with their cheerfully undulating battlement concealing twin C15th parallel naves – convent and parish church – make this the largest medieval survivor in the City. Some drastic work by Pearson and then, after war damage, equally controversial removal thereof by the ubiquitous QT. Now an atmosphere of school parents’ evening invoked by evangelicals, instruments of conversion on sale and leaflets thrust into one’s reluctant hand, the intimidating, frenzied smiles, seemingly unaware of the unsurpassed cornucopia of venerable monuments, spectacular pulpit and doorcase - other splendours. Look out for the aforementioned Andrew Judd (or Judde), founder of Tonbridge School, Lord Mayor, Citizen, Skinner and East India Company member, grand-nephew of Archbishop Henry Chichele.

 

Hasilwood House ex-Hudson’s Bay House, 52-68 Bishopsgate – 1928, Mewès & Davis, a grand if ever there was, canting facade like a mighty ship, with mariner’s cupola aloft, it crushes the narrowness of Bishopsgate. Yet a colonnaded portico into a cour d’honneur and French chateau style block[i] .... (see also their 51 Threadneedle Street, ‘Palazzo Massimi’ → 8.City 1). This marvellous arrangement truly offers an alternative urban solution, as J&W opine.

 

St. Ethelburga, Bishopsgate, ‘St. Ethelburga-the-Virgin-within-Bishopsgate’, correctly, pre-Fire, not Wren, a miraculous survivor despite those who might deflower, a rather neat square of blank stone walling pierced by single three-light Perp window and surmounted by a boxy platform and wooden belfry. ‘Cleanse my transgressions, not only my face’ reads the Greek palindrome, the longest such, here in this the tiniest of City churches. Sir John would have been startled by the self-righteous, latter day Puritans, the cohort in the ranks of the Midianite Army of ‘Administrators, professorial chairs in subjects such as Civics, and the cad out for himself, pretending to be kind’ – who have made this a ‘Centre for Reconciliation and Peace’ with its Bedu tent.

 

Ugh!

 

Finally, aforementioned Dashwood House, at 69 Old Broad St – Yorke Rosenberg & Mardall, an increasingly rare ‘70s survivor (1973-76) thanks to renovation by Fletcher Priest in 2008.

 

It’s time to take a rest before our next leg.

 

And the dry stone no sound of water.

OnlyThere is shadow under this red rock,

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock)