The City on the Thames by Simon Jenkins

Author:Simon Jenkins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

New century, new style

Elsewhere London entered into the spirit of Edwardian pomp by continuing the renewal of its Georgian fabric begun by the late Victorians. It did so ruthlessly. There was, as yet, no thought given to respecting, let alone conserving, anything of the past. A campaign of widespread demolition was to continue for half a century. Even places of worship were not sacred. In the City, seventeen of Wren’s churches were demolished, to make way mostly for banks. Only the tradition-soaked liveried guilds saved their ancient halls. Elsewhere, as estate leases fell due, owners destroyed with abandon. London’s main thoroughfares were almost entirely rebuilt in the boom years from 1890 to 1910.

In the matter of style, there was an eagerness to move on from the domestic ‘sweetness and light’ of the Dutch and Queen Anne revival. It seemed too meek an architectural language for a great empire. But where to go was unclear. The architect John Brydon called for a patriotic reversion to Hogarth’s favourites, Wren and Vanbrugh, whose English baroque had been ‘fairly established as the national style, the vernacular of the country’. Brydon even declared baroque to be ‘the style of the future’, represented by his imposing government office building overlooking Parliament Square.

In the outturn it was a case of anything goes. Andrew Saint’s study of London at the turn of the century offers a wealth of promiscuous eclecticism. He lists churches still in formal gothic, such as Holy Trinity Sloane Street, rich in Arts and Crafts fittings (built in 1888). He moves on through the French renaissance Ritz Hotel (1903), the Byzantine Westminster Cathedral (1895), the American neo-classical Selfridge’s (1908), the Flemish Middlesex Guildhall in Parliament Square (1913) and the Scots baronial New Scotland Yard (1887).

London’s first large blocks of flats, built in 1880 by Norman Shaw, towered over both the Royal Albert Hall and his own Lowther Lodge next door. Similar cliffs rose Haussmann-like along Victoria Street, Buckingham Palace Road, Knightsbridge, Marylebone Road, Maida Vale and St John’s Wood. Tenants of this new urbanism were desperate not to be seen as second best. One critic stressed that living in flats per se ‘does not stamp them as failures’, while ‘no one who looks at them from outside should be able to guess that the rents are low’.

By now London’s main streets were losing the visual coherence recorded by Tallis in the 1830s. Indeed, the street as the defining element in London’s landscape was now replaced by individual buildings. As these buildings tended to be commissioned by users rather than landlords, they inevitably took on a self-regarding rather than a neighbourly personality. Most of London’s signature buildings from this period are in some version Brydon’s approved baroque: the Old Bailey (1903), the Port of London Authority (1909), the War Office in Whitehall (1906), County Hall (1909), the Methodist Central Hall (1905) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (1899–1909). When plans were drawn up for the demolition of Nash’s Regent Street, baroque was prescribed for its replacement,

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