Andrew Ashdown

LONDON NOW: An Odyssey Through the Nation's Capital

 

8. The City 1

 

 

8b. The Bank to The Tower

 

And now this gaping hole. Bucklersbury House 1953-58, demolished, making way for the new Walbrook Square – by, who else, Foster. Fingers crossed. That has removed, for the time being at any rate, the Temple of Mithras aka the London Mithraeum – of AD 240, discovered on site in 1954, reminding us that St. Pauls, St. Stephens and all the rest would never have happened without the basilican adoption of competing cults in the late Empire.

 

St. Stephen Walbrook was the dry-run for St. Paul’s and is arguably the most remarkable of all post-Reformation churches in the metropolis – saying something. One places it with St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields as the sin qua non of English Classicism, the acme of a very particular and refined sensibility realised in the mathematically informed handling of space and disciplined attention to detail. When you think of it, the circle within a square – it’s a formula from Ancient Greece but burnished in the quasi-Christian ritual of the octagonal baptisteries of Florence.

 

The coffered white arc of the dome spins the viewer round, guying in every axis the facsimile arrangement of angled entablatures over unfluted Corinthian columns, above which tiptoe eight delicate arches for the implied octagonal space; all is white, white, white - and light, which added to the geometries obliterates the dissonances and incoherence of most churches, creating a kind of English Taj Mahal. Thus the trial run for St. Paul's in some ways outdoes its more famous, grander progeny. Now the church teeters perilously on the edge of Foster’s vast gaping hole and the displaced Temple leaves the church vulnerable in other ways.

 

Compensation in Rem Koolhaas and Ellen van Loon's New Court opening up a whole new vista for Rothschild’s - the cool, cubic, light-filled evanescence much preferable to their acrobatics in Beijing.Much used as a stick to beat Foster, deservedly so, a case of outward versus inward looking, travertine and diaphanous ethereality against in-your-face priapic, top shelf magazine gloss. Both the new prospect and the belvedere are nods to tradition - the latter, Chatsworth or Palazzo Pandolfini, say, albeit off limits to Joe Public – corporate-thinking.

 

Do visit the tiny churchyard out the back and spot Jute's Passage

 

The whizzing curves of Foster’s Walbrook Building (‘The Walbrook’ – ‘Wobble’ might be more appropriate) interpose a relentless rhythm of brise soleil intensifying as they ascend and bend away .... This is probably the die, stencil, mould, exemplar, plate, trial run, begetter – for the ‘groundscraper’ ‘Blobbitecture’ of which Foster remains the chief exponent and high priest with:

Tower Place (→ 10.City 2)

Gherkin (→ 10.City 2)

1 London Wall (→ 10.City 2)

though others have followed:

Grimshaw (St. Botolph Building → 10.City 2)

 

Rounded edges are everywhere:

Bracken House (the remodelling by Hopkins → 7.St.Pauls)

20 Gresham Street (KPF → 10.City 2)

30 Gresham St (Siddell Gibson → 8.City)

107 Cheapside (the rear elevation - John Robertson →8.City above↑ )

Procession House (RHWL → 7.St.Pauls)

Winchester House, London Wall / Old Broad Street – Swanke, Hayden, Connell (→ 10. City2)

 

some only for the sills / plates:

60 Threadneedle Street (Eric Parry)(→ 8.City1 above ↑)

 

or the corners in emphasised horizontals:

Watling House (Arup below ↓)

168 Fenchurch / 70 Gracechurch (John Simpson then BDP 2002 → 10.City 2)

 

while others are whole buildings curved around:

150 Cheapside (Aukett → 7.St. Pauls)

Sainsbury’s Headquarters (Foster → 6.Holborn)

 

An exception is Foster unusually angular

10 Gresham Street (→ 10.City 2)

 

But no doubt ‘The Walbrook’ personifies, epitomise, exemplifies the new City aesthetic more so than any other form, while the Gherkin serves merely to raise a banner high and draw our attention to the spherical unanimity below.

 

Relief comes at –

 

60 Queen Victoria Street by Peter Foggo 2011, HSBC offices in a patinated bronze panelling and grilles, akin, in its variegated turquoise accents, to verdigris copper and continuing in the structural supports - the repertory of support system and surface thus a unified rhetoric as homogeneous and unearthly as the biomechanical planetoid forms in Alien. The City is delving into polychromaticsim and bled colour, into textures and laminates the tones altering irridescently and through the nature-aided artifice of weathering and oxidisation. The City is incandescent.

 

Without further ado, as we have an interminable journey ahead, we head down to St. Mary Aldermary in Queen Victoria Street. Medieval all through but reconstruction – for want of a better word – of pre-Fire Gothic by Wren – rationalised and liberated of detail outside, fan-vaulted within, albeit in white plaster and with these saucer domes where the fans, unlike medieval ones, are not elided but full half circles and so leave gaps. With aisles and traceried ashlar against white plaster walls, it says ‘East Anglia’ (see St. Margaret → 2.Westminster). A long lens toward the Victorian revival of Barry by way of Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, perhaps.

 

Facing each other on triangular sites now – the junction of Queen Victoria and Cannon Streets:

 

Credit Lyonnais (next to Bracken House → 7.St. Pauls) which jetties outward in an unwitting nod to English vernacular tradition while deploying a filigree encasement - prefabricated glass-fibre reinforced cement - similar to Centre Point but with a delicacy not found e.g. at the metallic tubular chrysalis of Bush Lane House (coming up →). It’s 1973–7, by Whinney, Son and Austen Hall, engineered by Arup. One could be forgiven for seeing a conflation of Nos. 33-35 Eastcheap (below↓) and -

 

Albert Buildings by Frederick J Ward, 1869, which occupies a symmetrically inverted site across the intersection. Prima facie Italianate in feel (all these shafts) but, on closer inspection, the ‘thickly bracketed cornices of corbel tables’, intensity of arches and relieving arches on shafts with stiff-leaf capitals, bespeak a familiar and unexpected genre – the inside of a Gothic cathedral, the arcade-triforium-clerestory elevation of the Île de France yet with spandrels densely worked in the Lincoln manner .... a vain plea to stay with Gothic.

 

But we are virtually touching our St. Paul’s route now as we find Ove Arup’s Watling House at 33 Cannon Street which, though with St. Pauls in terms of height, seems also to defer to the bulging bay form of Bracken House (→ 7.St.Pauls) and brise-soleil of Foster’s Walbrook (we saw ↑) acting as a visual bridge, in the way Wilkins’ much-maligned National Gallery does with St. Martin’s (→4.Trafalgar).

 

In COLLEGE HILL, a pair of C17th doorways have found a new home, delighting J&N.

 

At St. Michael, Paternoster Royal a classic exercise in juxtaposition, contrasting bare surface with ornamentation, unarticulated plane with complex modulation. That’s the tower - three flat, empty stages, bar a window below, porthole amidships and square double-opening of bell-hole above. Then the explosion – a ring of freestanding Ionic columns, each under its own projecting entablature topped by a square urn - linked in an octagonal ring about a second, higher, inner ring of pilasters - no columns - the entablature similarly urned before the final stage is reached –a colonnaded octagon - a St. Bride’s ‘cog’ - and the final tiny cylinder in the manner of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates. All this and seven handsome, round-headed windows in seven bays.

 

Then, how about St. James, Garlickhythe – where hang the Jubilee Bells. Similar to its contemporary St. Stephen Walbrook in the experimentation with a central plan though more exposed to the street, and similar tower with this delicately handled top stage anticipating the west towers of St. Paul’s.

 

Rabobank is by Kohn Pederson Fox and, given the client, on an appropriately reclaimed site over the pavement which is included in the scheme, infinitely more acceptable than their Goldman Sachs HQ in Fleet Street (Mid City Place → 6.Hoborn), promoting a dialogue with the river with the same openness and delicacy as, say, Halpern’s Eagle Wharf.

 

The higgledy-piggledy French Renaissance facade of Vintners' Hall greets us in Upper Thames Street, a work of 1908-10 by A.H. Kersey, it survived the Blitz, which is more than can be said for the original C15th timber hall and its almshouses ('13 little mansions') burnt down on the night of Sunday 2 September 1666, less than 24 hours after the Great Fire began. The new hall, built in the 1670s, forms a welcome, secluding courtyard. Not much outside but the interiors include a delicious staircase and the Hall itself with C19th Minstrels Gallery and cautionary portrait of a lady whose visage becomes ‘less and less serene’ as you walk around the room.

 

Next door and running back all the way to face onto the Thames

From the sublime to ersatz, repro- classical, unclassified, is Vintners Place à la Wentworth tack, or South East Asian condominiums, Chinese copycat towns – Whinney Mackay-Lewis, 1990-93 – an instructive foil to Fitzroy Robinson’s unrepentantly modern 10 Queen Street Place the other side of the Southwark Bridge approach road. The slatted horizontals continue the genre of the National Theatre and other riverside monoliths.

 

This side of the road, squeezing alongside, is Thames House, Edwardian Baroque, Colcutt & Hamp, 1911 (not to be confused with MI5 in Millbank → 21.Victoria) with arresting, refreshing deployment of forms – projecting bays with concave corners, rusticated columns, oriels, Diocletian windows, sculpted pediments .....

 

At Cannon Street Station there had been a nuclear bomb in the form of John Poulson obliterating E.M. Barry’s elegant terminus, leaving just the turrets guarding the ‘word processor’ of Mondial House, now replaced by Watermark Place.

 

"As you continue down the river (Thames), it is poignant that you can only just glimpse Wren's Monument to the Great Fire as you pass the dreadful Mondial House. To me this building is redolent of a word processor. I don't see that people particularly want a perpetual view of a word processor when they find themselves living with them all the time in the office or at home".

 

The station once had a hotel more magnificent than Charing Cross, as too had Holborn Viaduct.

 

Cannon Place, Foggo Associates, of 30 metre X-frame struts, must be a riposte to the tubular mesh of Bush Lane House and also reminiscent of SOM’s solution for Liverpool Street (→ 10.City 2) thereby protecting Roman remains .... ; the mesh cladding of the stair-wells is something else altogether, like those pen holders or waste-baskets.

 

Justice for the demolition of All Hallows-the-Great - yes. Forget 1666 – that was an accident. 1876, 1894 and 1964 are the years that live in infamy where this church is concerned – respectively, the partial demolition, near complete demolition (leaving the tower standing) and final evisceration of a Wren gem. According to the 1812 engraving by Skelton it was a two vesselled box with three round-headed windows and a west tower, square and parapetted at the top. The plan for a spire never bore fruit and the furnishings, some of the best in London, were dispersed. Under here was the Roman Governor’s House or, more likely, administrative offices.

 

SOUTHWARK BRIDGE

 

Dyers Hall The company’s website gives some candid and self-deprecatory history of misfortune. A case of Mr. Worthington. The first hall of c. 1482, was in Anchor Lane, St. Martins, the move to Upper Thames Street happening in 1545. The new hall perished twice: in the Great Fire and after another fire in 1681. For the next fifty years, the ‘somewhat chastened Company’ met in other venues or private houses until 1731 when two houses on the Company's Dowgate Hill Estate were procured – only to collapse in 1763! Number 4 went up in 1769; it lasted until 1840 when the foundations gave way. No.5 opened October 1842. WWII damage was put right and since when the usual refurbishment. It has an almost domestic scale and sensibility. In contrast with the white stucco of Skinners (below↓) the Dowgate Hill front presents a deep pink used unsparingly for all the flat wall surface, offset by a cream rusticated base, quoins, Ionic pilasters and window surrounds (pedimented, alternately triangular and straight, Venetian for the outer bays) the attic storey with pediment enclosing a lunette. Round the corner in College Street is the eponymous architect’s original front - the colour scheme continued, Italianate, a triumvirate of arches under projecting balcony to three square simply moulded windows below the plain modillioned cornice. They’re very keen on their Millennium Window with its dyed cloth, vats of dye and corded sacks of ‘madder’ (also in the Company's coat of arms).

 

The Innholders are here also – a ‘convincing’ C17th interior with one of only two surviving plaster ceilings of the period.

 

Next, Skinners’ Hall The first Skinners met in local taverns or churches. By the end of the 13th century they were using the ‘Copped Hall’. Now, wondrous white stucco two storey podium and blind portico, hexastyle giant Ionic pilasters on rusticated base crowned by the 1770 pediment framing the coat of arms against a blue background, a scheme echoed around the metropolis, as we shall see (Athenaeum →20.Pall Mall, Cumberland Terrace →22.Regents Park).The main hall, reached via the courtyard with an enticing cloister (Edwardian Ionic - not an easy concept), is capacious with minstrels’ gallery and paintings by Sir Frank Brangwyn. The outer hall is open to the gallery and has a glass chandelier made for Catherine the Great of Russia. But the court room of 1670 (‘available to hire for private or corporate events’) is the highlight, perfumed by Virginia pencil cedar panelling.

 

(n.b. we saw the East India connections in the Box at → 5.Strand): Sir Andrew Judd, member of the Company as well as the East India, Lord Mayor of London, grand-nephew of Archbishop Henry Chichele).

 

At sixes and sevens with Merchant Taylors – Tweedledum and ....

 

Now, in CANNON STREET

 

Salters Hall Court - the Honourable Salters Company was here, now moved to Fore Street near London Wall (→10. City 2).

 

St. Swithin’s Church by Wren 1677-86, burned out in the Blitz had, over the square plan, an octagonal dome echoing the octagonal form of the tower, whose bevelled corners eased the transition to the spire, the whole church rather reminiscent of St. Mary-at-Hill. Now the site of a forgettable (and largely it seems forgotten) office at No.111 Cannon Street a block of the modest proportions and scale you might have at one time expected in, say, Tokyo or Beijing and at various times the offices of W.H. Smith and a bank, it was designed by Biscoe & Stanton.

 

And if that were not sufficiently ignominious, a cage in the side of the wall is all there is to house the London Stone, Saxum Londiniense, the City’s Lodestone, Ring of Nibelungen, green stick, talisman, Arc of the Covenant, oracle, Golden Key. But this yields neither immortality nor omniscience – only a memory of where stood the Roman Forum, where beat the heart of the City. Summerson employs the London Stone as the central point of a 10 mile circle delineating the spread of Georgian houses[viii]. It also lies on a Ley Line, of which the fulcral point is supposedly Ludgate Circus[ix] .... It too is oolitic, released from a watery grave.(see also: Runes - Rosetta Stone - British Museum → 16.Bloomsbury)

 

The metallic tubular chrysalis of Bush Lane House (already mentioned) can be dealt with now. Arup Associates, somewhere between Foster’s Hearst Tower, New York and the Lloyds Building down the road (see →10.City 2) also by Rogers. Of course it had its challenges - straddling what was going to be the new Jubilee Line extension (never happened). As well as for bracing, the trellis tubing is apparently filled with water as a method of fire prevention, or at least postponement.

 

St. Mary, Abchurch is approached via a pleasant forecourt and warm red brick wall of large and smaller windows greet one. There are stone dressings including quoins, a convex roof and a rather flimsy-looking steeple at the NW corner. Within, the shallow dome on pendentives, William Snow’s stunning painting - despite repeated retouching - looking decidedly murky even with the light from the oval windows. The splendid pulpit and tester by William Grey and dark wood all around climax in Grinling Gibbons’ limewood reredos, his largest work outside St. Pauls – destroyed in WWII and pieced together from two thousand fragments. Of the high box pews only those around the walls (once with dog kennels) remain, the rest replaced by lower pews. One is met by a gracious Church Watcher from the Friends of City Churches, a tone of welcome or overbearingness – leaflets to be returned when finished with.

 

Just take a peek down King William Street (Eliot’s crowd from London Bridge) .....

 

Banque Nationale de Paris – Fitzroy Robinson & Partners, 1974-8 – hiding away, Pevsner or Lander allude to Kevin Roche Dinkerloo but what about Paul Rudolph’s Yale University Art & Architecture Building (1963) or Boston City Hall (Kallmann, McKinnell & Knowles 1968)?

 

Also Zevett!

 

Finally, St. Clement, Eastcheap, ‘Just the sort of place that gets destroyed by administrators’ chirrups Sir John as he rails against one of his favourite targets. Always the mot juste! Were the ‘bells of St. Clemen’s’ Eastcheap or Danes? A Portland stone box, the reredos enhanced over-enthusiastically by Sir Ninny - after Butterfield (of all people) split it three ways to assuage the Tractarians.

 

St. Martin Orgar’s similarly proportioned campanile has been requisitioned (commandeered, conscripted, press ganged) by St. Clement’s. Tower only - but what a tower! So prim and perfectly cubic. But not Wren. All joined up somehow with St. Clements and its similarly exquisite perpendicular (in the original sense of the word) one could almost say ‘Tuscan’ tower. Both claim ‘Halfpence and farthings, say the bells ....’

 

Guardian Royal Insurance 68 King William Street/ Gracechurch Street and, since 2003, House of Fraser – H.L. Anderson 1920-22: a dome does not make a monumental building, according to Pevsner[x]. So we turn instead, to:

 

The Monument, its plinth half sunk in the ground, somewhat lost in the mêlée, was more about science than mere combustion, as much lab kit as architecture. The relationship between the begetters - Hooke and Wren - and the context in which this oddity came to life, is well adduced in Lisa Jardine’s unusual take on the period. At 202 feet (65m) it’s higher than Nelson but fails to command the view amid the jostling glass mass of commercialism. However, look east and you get St. Nicholas Cole Abbey in line with St. Brides, the tower of the former PRO (→ 6.Holborn) and the gaping hood of Peterborough Court. For those unwilling to pay the increased charges, the bas-relief by Gabriel Cibber.

 

We decant, having trodden 311 steps, spinning anti-clockwise ....

 

St. Magnus the Martyr Eliot’s ‘Ionian white and gold’, let it be said, is nicely offset by dark mahogany in reredos, pew, pulpit, tester, lectern, stall and organ case, the gilded rood by Travers testament to the days of Ffynes-Clinton and the Eastern European and Walsingham connections. Peer through the windows at the clouds of incense and huddle of Latin-intoning, vestmented acolytes. It could be Seville or Compostela.

 

The eye-catching yellow at Riverbank House by EPR and David Walker with consultants Arup, 2010, is from the glass balcony soffits on opposing corners, contrasting horizontal white glass spandrel panels. Nice views. See also Yellow Building (→ 28.Hammersmith) and Barking Central (→ 12.NE Wedge).

 

Fishmongers Hall has a privileged river frontage, earned with this giant order of Ionic fluted columns rising to a plain pediment over rusticated base, the whole realised in the crispest of stonework and detailing – arguably more effective than the larger and more ornate Goldsmiths. Henry Roberts 1831-34.

 

The sentinel guarding the other side of the bridge is Adelaide House, unlovely in equal measure, straight out of New York r Chicago. Well, yes - Burnet, Tate & Partners, 1924-25. But have a peak at the entrance of black Belgian Doric marble.

 

Billingsgate Fish Market is no longer, of course a market. Like Leadenhall, it’s Horace Jones, the Architect and Surveyor to the City, in this case French Empire with rounded dormers (see India House → 5.Strand). Another corporate venue. I give way to the paean by Jones & Woodward:

 

porters carrying fish in towers of baskets .... now remembered only in the weather-vanes of

gilded fish on the roof pavilions

 

Watermen’s Hall belongs not to a Livery Company, strictly speaking, as answers to Parliament. The Hall, designed by William Blackburn in 1780, remains the only original Georgian Hall in the City of London, a pristine example of the period with fine Adam interiors. The Freemen's Room, Court Room, Silver Room and Parlour ‘form a suite of rooms that are both elegant and adaptable to modern day requirements’. Yup.

 

A late Roman town house and private bath are preserved in the basement of No.100 Lower Thames Street, one of the most complete relics of Roman architecture in London discovered 1848 during excavations for the Coal Exchange; further investigation followed in 1968-70. The Bath House wall is entirely of red tile; the large unheated room to SW is likely to have been the cold room or frigidarium with a red mosaic floor; two small apsed chambers likely to be the hot and warm rooms, caldarium and tepidarium, heated by pillared hypocausts.

 

Here stood Bunning’s Coal Exchange its cast iron dome 60 feet diameter and 74 high with cantilevered balconies[iii]; demolished despite all the protest in the 1960s. Externally, the corner site was fêted by an elevated Tholos or Choragic Monument of Lysicrates (take your pick).

 

The Custom House is too restrained for its own good and impressive for that, an almost subliminal manifestation on the river bank. Regulation (it seems by now) Portland stone, the north front of brick. 488 feet long (compare Somerset House →5.Strand) plain interior, the Long Room impressive for its dimensions 190 feet long by 66 feet wide by 54 feet high (compare others in the Box at →6.Holborn) and made possible through iron construction. The terrace is a fine contribution to the Riverside Walk on which a gold piano recently rocked to the sounds of Czech Olympic fans.

 

Smirke the ‘doctor’ had to rescue both this and the Millbank Penitentiary by Thos Hardwick. 

 

Another St. Stephens is St. Mary-at-Hill 1670-76, tower 1780, interior rebuilt J. Savage 1843. Wren’s ‘severe’ centralised plan (J&W[iv]), the dome supported by Corinthian columns from which four ‘transepts’ emerge. Once the least spoilt and most gorgeous in the City (according to Betjeman), all the more so for being hidden away ‘among cobbled alleys paved passages and brick walls overhung by a plane tree’. A schizophrenic church – the east end, facing St. Mary-at-Hill, of white Portland stone with a blank Venetian niche; the west a tower of brick, with simple arched and pedimented entrance below a lunette within an arched moulding and neat white quoining (see BOX: Architectural Schizophrenia → 22.Pall Mall).

 

St. Dunstan-in-the-East This elegant arrangement of flying buttresses, as Betj says, is St. Nicholas Newcastle (St. Giles Edinburgh was the other beneficiary). Having been rebuilt by Laing and Tite, 1817-21, it was then entirely gutted in 1941. And made a public garden.

 

Plantation Place is hard to defend in its ‘Rubik’s cube’ massing of elements – a design stemming entirely from the need to yield to height restrictions near the river and nevertheless making a maximal grab at rental space. The architects’ defence (reflective glass and setbacks) is all rather too reminiscent of Manhattan and so only adds to the sense of alienation. It’s another of these layered ecdysial forms (see 1 Wood Street → 7.St Pauls), here greenish blue glass emerging from a stone mullioned and finned carapace.

 

It replaced Plantation House the tea and rubber mart (more East India Company connections) .... with its ornate entrance and giant Corinthian columns.. .. an architectural conglomerate, the most distinguished part in 1935 by Albert Walter Moore (who did the Oxo Tower →26.South Bank); all that’s left are the six-sided iron framed and zinc lanterns, available for your garden ....

 

In its shadow, oddly solecistic leaded spire of St. Margaret Pattens – we’re there in just a mo.

 

Hereabout the hoard of 43 Roman gold coins in a box to add to the three Roman pavements in Fenchurch Street

 

Rafael Viñoly’s ‘Walkie Talkie’ (or ‘Hunchback’ as Hugh Pearman calls it[vii]) now rises at 20 Fenchurch Street – replacing the glass green box-with-a-hat by an earlier (William H.) Rogers for Kleinwort Bensons, demolished in 2008 – one of those odd little blocky block, half-baked skyscrapers of the pre-Big Bang era. Going, going, gone .... So close to the river. So oddly shaped – it’s not London (anymore than the Westin is New York, a point made by the New York Times). If you add the Cheesegrater (→ 10.City 2) and the roofed-in Blackfriars Bridge, then the view toward London Bridge, the sense of space opening up, has gone – forever. There were of course other probs. Grandpa used a hot lamp, I so well recall. Green goggles squinting at the incandescence. And we would use a magnifying glass to torture insects of one kind or another, set fire to cigarette or bubble-gum cards. The shape is hard to define but I can only liken it to a marooned Thames Barrier (→ 9.East) stanchion.

 

Fountain House, 30 Fenchurch Street, also by that non-starchitect W.H. Rogers - the first block-and-podium edifice in London, just edging, perhaps, Marathon House (→ 21.Upper West End & Marylebone).

 

see also:

Evergreen House (→ 15. Camden)

Marathon House, Marylebone Road (→ 21. Marylebone)

199 Sloane Street (→ 24.Knightsbridge)

 

By way of shocking, asperative contrast, Minster Court 1988-91, GMW Partnership the infamous post-modern intrusion, the rosy hue of its polished granite recalling the Battenberg Cake (q.v.) but this is all pointedly Gothic allusion, the result, as Pevsner (or Simon Bradley) say, akin to so much folded paper[ix] – one thinks of the paper garlands which once sufficed for Christmas decorations.

 

59-61 Mark Lane 1864, George Aitchinson Jnr (who did Leighton House → 28.Kensington), the outstanding work on this road, according to Pevsner, Veneto-Byzantine tiers of round-headed openings concealing an iron frame and with incised mastic-filled decoration , it was, according to Henry Russell Hitchcock, inspired by Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice.

 

Near Fenchurch Street Station, All-Hallows, Staining C15th & 1671, not Wren, an authentically battlemented, rubbly medieval tower of Kentish Rag as if in continuation of some ancient stratum erupting here and connecting with the Tower and all the medieval fragments from St. John’s Gate to the Jewel Tower and beyond ....

 

At No. 43 Eastcheap, in an angle to St. Margaret Pattens, this vermilion Georgian style Corinthian columned shop front.

 

St. Margaret, Pattens – or overshoes to avoid the you-know-what. Clogs. The all-lead spire achieves a double-take in being blackened lead yet with lucarnes and a perfect ‘Salisbury’ profile (and 200 ft of height) – contrasting with the white of supporting tower. The carved C17th churchwardens’ canopies are unique.

 

Hiding in here too, the dripping Germanic film-set of Eastcheap Nos.33-35 R.L. Roumieu, 1868 – ‘the scream that you wake on at the end of a nightmare’ in Ian Nairn’s appropriately OTT outburst.

 

Well then, we come to the one of four anchors to the City (with St. Paul’s, The Bank and Guildhall) – and the most ancient, of course. THE TOWER ‘s ancient ramparts and bailiwick – along with the surrounding hard standing - furnish one of London’s most precious open spaces, secluded from traffic and associated transport detritus, impedimenta. Once inside the walls, of course, you’re also out of view. Within these walls, you share (blanking out all other visitors, of which a-plenty) only the company of the guardian ravens and the gin advert figures with halberds and gaiters. Within, dull echoing chambers, grim doodles scratched upon the walls, halls brimful of shields, pikes, cuirasses, cowters, poleyns – and the travelator that glides you slowly, bizarrely past the paste replicas – an arrangement that was copied from or else inspired ‘The Generation Game’.

 

Tower Chapels ....Worth separate consideration, of course. St. John’s – Norman, tiny and numinous, the finest of its date, with rare tunnel vault and, aside from scalloped capitals, a purifying lack of ornament, preferable in every way to the overrated St. Bartholomew-the-‘Great’ (→ 10.City 2). St. Peter ad Vincula, a Tudor rebuild crammed with monuments.

 

Tower Moat Ice Rink is as near as we’ll ever get to the Frost Fares of yore – though the new compulsion to erect ever more bridges (Blackfriars, Garden, Blackwall) may slow the flow sufficiently such that, combined with some unforseen symptom of global warming, we are returned to the Little Ice Age.

 

Meanhwile, Tower Bridge will suffice for most of us. The unplanned emblem of the metropolis – unloved when built, determinedly anachronistic and sentimental – now as believable as the Coronation and State Opening of Parliament. But stick to the engineering rather than the olde worlde casing and you have another kind of architecture, altogether more impressive and with a not-to-be denied conviction. An ineffable purposefulness, sublime endurance and capacity. The duality of vision is St. Pancras Station – but we’ll come to that too, anon (→ 15.Camden).

 

All Hallows Barking or All Hallows-by-the-Tower to you and me, a green verdigris complex of consoles and spike. We end here, good place to do it, facing away from the Tower. Appropriately, too, the oldest church in the City – in the metropolis – with a date of 675, hence Saxon, under the See of Barking, though now many layers enfold and obscure. The Saxon arch of Roman tiles is put to good use, a Roman pavement beneath, some restoration by Pearson - the rest Lord Mottistone, his architects, Seely and Paget – Perpendicular, no bad thing (when you think of Winchester) - and copper Flemish spire. Pepys climbed the tower to watch the flames - Toc H Tubby Clayton, Lancelot Andrewes, William Penn (senior), all here. Magnificent Alderman Croke tomb. And a Grinling Gibbons font cover.

 

But to appreciate the City we need to step across the River of course and take the Canaletto view – anywhere from Tower Bridge gantry along to More London or Hays Galleriea, but there isn’t time. Any whimsical asides have been squeezed out by the sheer mass of fabric.

 

So .. all these cranes and ships ... I’m seeing them .... I .... can’t face the hysteria of the City, the claustrophobia of compressed glass and concrete fabric, the tight and winding streets, the Wren church about to leap from every corner, the Johnson bicycles. I need to escape! Get out of here. Nothing for it but to jump ship on ship rather. And head down the river.

 

We’ll come back later and pick up this thread of the City anon I promise. But right now, let’s go, let’s avail ourselves of a London Transport speedboat, whatever; let’s get going.