Andrew Ashdown
LONDON NOW:
An Oyssey Through the Nation's Capital
Preambulation
What should one pick as one favourite place to contemplate our capital, our great Metropolis, the one truly global city in Britain? Parliament Square? Charing Cross (the cabbies’ official central point)? A gondola on the so-called ‘London Eye’? The Jagati plinth of the Shree Sanatan Hindu Mandir? An open-top bus or a bench on Parliament Hill? The telescope on King Henry’s Mound in Richmond Park?
The Shard?
For me (and I wonder, perhaps, you, dear reader) a more modest redoubt? A rectangle of dry grass is all I ask, Green Park say, jacket rolled in makeshift pillow, hat or knotted handkerchief to shield the sun, ward off tree-sap; laces loosed, legs outstretched, to gaze as the cumulus moves transcendentally, inexorably, above; now dimming, now releasing the sun, distrails of aircraft imperceptibly forming and fading into the blue. Pigeons despatched (and the man charging for deckchairs likewise), I fall to dreaming .... of places, things ....
Dining at Claridge's, tea at the Ritz, dinner at the Savoy (make that the Grill). The balcony of the Lord Aberconway pub opposite Liverpool Street Station; a front seat at the Proms, tall chair in the Long Room at Lords, armchair in some Pall Mall club or -a stool at Pelicci’s Café, Bethnal Green Road.
A hamper from Fortnum’s, compôte from Harrods, keepsake from Aspreys or Burlington Arcade; brogues from Lobb, a suit for the Derby. A ticket for the Olympic Park? No, that’s too far-fetched, even for this exercise, especially if including the AcelorMittal Tower. An invitation to ‘Taj Mittal’ itself would be more likely!
But, in the mind’s eye, dear reader, you see, we have it all – like Nelson in Trafalgar Square or Alan Sugar ensconced in his office in the Gherkin (or wherever): we have all in our compass. We can enter these places, partake of concoctions and elixirs, delicacies, or put our hands together for the curtain call, nod at the self-styled celebrities - with the best of them. We can walk with kings, eschew the common touch - of things inanimate, tangible, earthly .... We are ethereal, creatures of the imagination. Thus we parade on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, disport solemnly at the Cenotaph - even ascend the Telkom Tower – never mind the twisted roller coaster of Hackney Marsh - or watch from Centre Point the press of shoppers and lines of stranded buses squeezed together in Oxford Street. We can go higher – above the Eye and The Shard, the grating view-blocker of Leadenhall, the heat reflector in Fenchurch - up into the clouds. All is possible. Just free your mind!
We fly!
And from the air (or Google Earth) London presents its remarkable, signature image, the one we are all familiar with from the approach into Heathrow: the relentlessly repeated pattern of terraced brick and tile, like so much parallel hatching - herringbone or ‘checker plate’ - vernacular Norfolk pargetting or embossed sheet metal, stamped patterns in a grid .... in endless repetition. In Sir George Summerson’s famous ‘Air View’ we are suspended for three minutes above the streets, watching two centuries whizz by. Well, we can tarry longer – and not worry about the centuries slipping past.
Below is spread the great panorama. A million buildings, unparalleled, indeed unique, in form and manifestation. So utterly unlike what, in other places - less fortunate realms (!) - passes as the standard template for the ‘metropolis’ or ‘conurbation’.
The profile is complex, confusing and appallingly busy – in a visual sense - a hive of jostling, inchoate shapes: angular, curved, cylindrical, wedged - hipped, gabled, chimneyed, pinnacled, turretted and domed ... ancient and modern, yet .... and here is the strange thing - largely devoid of verticality. In terms of ‘tall’ and ‘supertall’, thrusting high rises in their smart materials, gleaming climate responsive surfaces and glinting telecommunications towers – not much. Think of Hong Kong, New York, Shanghai – Dallas, Melbourne, Jakarta .... No. This is a low rise city. Even the current threat of 220 or 230 ‘towers’ does not add up when examined closely. A mere handful are by any definition ‘skyscrapers’. We speak these days of groundscrapers but this is not new. A few pallid sticks up the west end; in the City, a serviceable cluster of semi-tall topped out by the hubristic wedge of the Cheesegrater; the solitary thrust of The Shard on the opposite bank, technically ‘super-tall’ and passing muster, I suppose; another finger just emerged at the bend of the river to add to the poignantly absurd chimneys of Battersea and, finally, eastward, the isolated blocks of Canary Wharf which vie with the City for supremacy.
All in all, a muted answer to the vast sproutings of the Pearl River Delta or the Gulf. Let’s be honest, the scales are everywhere tipped in favour of ‘abroad’ - from the Big Apple and Windy City to Guangzhou and HK and the hellish Sao Paulo. But, but .... this is all to miss the point. Look again, look beyond the prima facie. Or beneath, rather. Crammed between the handful of finger-pointing glass irises, you find a lower order of verdure, an assortment of roof and parapet, chimney, mansard, gable, turret and dome, in glass and metal, stone, brick and terracotta, tiling, concrete and anodised bronze: shuttered, ribbed, balconied and gothic-bayed, orieled, under roofs of lead or tile, dormered, skylit. A seething mass of five to ten storey fabric that constitutes the bulk of the metropolis - bulkier, glassier in the City, true, but otherwise ubiquitously brick and plaster, cluttering in a density of aesthetic and historical fascination that defies easy description.
A palimpsest ... tapestry – patchwork quilt .... What really is there in those other cities to compare? Between their high-rises sprawl indifferent blocks of gimcrack; in Tokyo, a surfeit of mini-skyscrapers, Jakarta, Sao Paulo, well, let’s face it, slums. If you take the whole, then, surely, the sheer mass of fabric, of solid edifice, here exceeds by far those flimsy side-shows of the Orient, with their superficial, fugitive excrescence as fragile as couch grass or the paper-stalked weeds that burst forth after tropical rain.
(or the 'hawsered' hi-tech that has lately sprouted from the studios of the River Lords - that too will wither - or melt, like hoarfrost on a bright winter morning).
This solidity is the product, not of a stasis, but of dynamism, volatility, movement, re-imagination and invention. London mutates and re-invents itself, with a violence that brooks no resistance, matching any city on earth. It does so organically and piece-meal: the plans of Jones, Wren and Nash came to nought – the first two not even leaving the drawing board, the latter implemented only as far as its central spine of Regent Street plus the area round Trafalgar Square. One of the perils of undertaking this kind of exercise - especially in these avaricious and rapacious times - is that of being overtaken by events, of becoming outdated before the ink has even run dry - or rather been typed and uploaded. I've already mentioned the 'threat'.
The buildings explored here include many that have long since disappeared, demolished under the wreckers ball and hammer, victims of wartime incendiary or planners’ pencil – everywhere you will see how I have clung onto to favourites, included them (and highlighting them in purple, thus) even as the reality speaks otherwise.
Falling towers ....
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria,
Vienna London
Unreal
Of course, now we have a new respect and realisation of worth accorded this venerable fabric. Yet, this too does not mean inaction. Rather, there is a new kind of momentum - an interior revolution of renovation and makeover implemented out of sight, inside the shells, behind the 'retained facades'. Glass and brushed steel, aluminium and fibreglass, cantilevered newels and polymered partitions in pastel, light-reflectant shades, reinforced glass floors and subdued strobe, laser and spot lighting - usher intelligent, responsive environments with internet cabling, multi-modal surround sound and digi screen ubiquity fit for purpose - for office and shop and display – for functions, corporate and diverse, inducing managed organisational change within a bio-diverse, eco-friendly, health and safety-approved, BSI-standard, culturally sensitive, BREEAM-certified, sustainable environment - while outside, the venerable facades are cleaned and polished - not as did the Victorians, bleaching away colour, chiselling off plaster and ‘improving’ in accordance with their own mores and tastes, doctrine - no. Restored - ‘conserved’ - with historical verisimilitude, to a state of pristine cleanliness unknown since their first appearance. Better even. A hidden revolution is underway, quietly, dissimulating, surreptitious ....
And the whole place - the central busines district - is growing, spreading beyond the time-honoured boundaries of Tower Bridge and Earls Court to embrace the Docklands and Stratford eastward while the Thames embankment is hemmed all along with apartments, albeit sub-let or for the whey-faced suited children of the Big Bang.
Separate to this is the move towards becoming a world museum, as, with the growing appreciation of a dwindling past (concomitantly and paradoxically) more and more buildings, with the passage of time, acquire venerable status, a process accelerated by the perception, real or otherwise, of a loss of craft and skill - resource - for recreating such again. As more and more fabric retreats iteratively into the past, so the whole of Central London is fast becoming a heritage attraction in the manner of Florence, Padua or Venice, to be protected, given the heritage treatment, preserved - conserved - in aspic. The loss of the Adelphi, the vandalising of the Bank, bull-dozing of Euston Arch are all reminders of a situation to which it is declared we must never return, the Victory of St. Pancras (surveyed by John Betjeman) ensuring it never will.
London mutates, evolves, continually, a seething mass of organic shift, like the hidden fires and molten magma of a dormant volcano poised to erupt .... as dan Ackroyd said, a City without sentiment or nostalgia, always on the move, violent, inexorable, which will see the present time’s whims and fashions out and enter yet another chapter beyond our imagining still.
READING
There are books on this: books and books. And one must select. Top of the pile for this wonderer has been Edward Jones and Chris Woodward, ‘A Guide to the Architecture of London', ‘Pevsner with illustrations’, if you like, and beautifully photographed withall, ingeniously organised, judiciously selected, authoritatively authored and absorbingly appended (for example, an examination of the evolution of the London street pattern, the squares and the great estates that built them). All in all, a must for the connoisseur and dilettante alike as well as an eye-opener for those who spend too much time in Oxford Street and other dreary thoroughfares untroubled by the riches that lie but an alley or door away – even, above our heads, as a website and Twitter account attest. I've already mentioned Ackroyd, of course, a wordsmith so gifted with the powers of imagination and other necessary attributes of the flaneur as to have been perhaps the chief inspiration here. And if I use the phrase ‘sends one’ hereafter then let me acknowledge it here and now: I’ve mentioned Pevsner – his Buildings of England Series with its six volumes covering London, is the Bible of the architectural amateur enthusiast and scholar alike, albeit at times exhausting, now in these more discursive and user-friendly paperback guide-booky formats. It’s his phrase and a good one. I have another, stranger book which adds a miscellany – that truly is the word – of things, with whose intrepid author I have corresponded: ‘London, a Subjective Guide’ by David Backhouse. Check out page 498, ‘Skyscrapers’. The Jonglez editions, in their secret cities series, by Rachel Howard and Bill Nash, are both handy and great fun but more scholarly and engaging is Ed Glinert’s rightly celebrated ‘The London Compendium’, like London itself, taking one off down hidden alleyways to unexpected prospects, mixing rumour and gossip with confounding historical truth. Oh, and there’s the London Encyclopaedia – the last word on everything.
And so to the present effort. And how should I begin? No point making a long, listless inventory by date, style, function, architect, developer, appeal, quality, material, footprint, BREEAM classification, notoriety or blimping height ... no, that would be a death of sorts. Rather, let us proceed as on a walk, or rather, as already vouchschafed, an imaginary flight, as a bird that soars and swoops in all directions unbounded by elevation or viewpoint free to roam above the swirl of traffic unhindered by the dictates of road and pavement and other gridlines .... unfettered as the imagination to alight where’re it wills, and yielding, not the smudgy, sponge-like unreality of Google Earth, but - verisimilitude. As if one were really there. It’s over to you, Dear Reader!
THE ROUTE
1 Victoria
2 Westminster
3 Whitehall
4 Trafalgar Square
5 The Strand
6 Holborn-Fleet Street
7 St. Pauls
8 The City: 1, St. Pauls to The Tower
9 East, Canary Wharf, Docks, Wapping, Greenwich
10 The City: 2, The Tower to Smithfield
11 Clerkenwell
12 NE Wedge: Olympics, Stratford, Barking &c
13 Hampstead
14a The North-West
14b The North
15 Camden
16 Bloomsbury & Fitzrovia
17 Covent Garden
18 The West End
19 Mayfair, Park Lane, Hyde Park
20 Pall Mall & St. James
21 Marylebone
22 Regents Park & St. Johns Wood
23 Paddington & Westbourne Grove
24 Knightsbridge
25 Belgravia
26 Chelsea
27 South Kensington
28 Kensington- Holland Park
29 Hammersmith & Fulham
30 West
31 The South Bank
32 South
The boundaries of these peregrinations, ambles, journeys cannot be, I hope you will concede, watertight; areas shade one into another and there are buildings which seem more at home in a locality other than their postcode insists. Areas have flimsy boundaries, exist in the imagination and discourse rather than reality – Fitzrovia, Summers Town, Spitalfields .... Nor can one strictly follow every pavement, bus route and underground line – one will be apt to fly off at points – not only where a building comes physically into view because of height or prominence, appreciability along a vista, but simply when, for all kinds of reasons, thematic imperatives or personal peccadilloes, it comes to mind ....
So Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Yes, indeed. How on earth to cope with such a task? Well, help is at hand. We have with us a retinue of travel companions – some present, almost, as it were, in the flesh, others out of sight or sound, subliminal and sublimated, implied and felt rather than physically manifest - raconteurs, anecdotalists, architectural pundits, enthusiasts all, archaeological diggers and kleptomaniacal Autolycuses some, certainly. Among them, eloquent, companionable and diverting, the aforementioned John Betjeman, Poet Laureate and ardent lover of the metropolis, hereafter ‘Betj’, ‘Sir John’ ‘the Laureate’ and other cloying sobriquets as come to hand. Others, equally erudite and companionable – architectural and antiquarian - intellectuals, bon viveurs, the inconsolably curious, opinionated or driven .... names familiar: Pepys, Evelyn, Defoe, Donne, Swift, Johnson, Dickens, Galsworthy .... Also, of course, just mentioned, the formidable Nikolaus Pevsner (Betjeman’s colleague and nemesis). Ackroyd, Cruikshank, Nairn, Sinclair ... to make sense or else debunk what seems beyond our ken.
As Samuel Pepys ruled and lined 282 pages of his newly purchased notebook, leather bound with gilt edged pages, so one savours the prospect of delivering the first words onto the watermarked, textured cartridge paper ... or screen in this case.
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.