The London Compendium by Ed Glinert

Author:Ed Glinert
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2003-01-18T21:00:00+00:00

– Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens

(1865)

A major example of the English Baroque, St John was designed by Thomas Archer between 1715 and 1728 as the most expensive of the fifty new churches planned in the 1711 Act, the foundations having to be sunk securely into swampy land. Queen Anne, irritated by architects asking for her approval of the design, kicked over her footstool and told Archer ‘build it like that’, resulting in the church becoming known as Queen Anne’s footstool. The church was not immediately popular, Robert Walpole, the prime minister, dismissing the architect as ‘a Mr Archer, the groom porter’. It burned down in 1742, was struck by lightning in 1773 and was bombed during the Second World War, after which it was rebuilt for use as a concert hall.

Transport House (1920–99), east junction with Dean Bradley

Built in the 1920s as the headquarters of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU), much to the delight of the dockers’ leader Ernest Bevin, who took pride in a working-men’s association being able to move into a costly eight-storey building within the precincts of the Palace of Westminster, at a time when no union had so salubrious a headquarters. It soon became home to the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Party, who shared the property until 1957 when the former moved to Great Russell Street, Bloomsbury. The Labour Party left for Walworth Road, south of Elephant and Castle, in 1981, the TGWU moved out in 1999, and the building is now the home of the Local Government Association.

• Birth of the Labour Party, p. 56.

(vi) Pimlico

A mostly down-at-heel triangle of land south of Victoria, dominated by crumbling stucco terraces, Pimlico’s unusual name relates either to the Pamlico tribe of Red Indians, who exported timber to London in the seventeenth century, or to a Ben Pimlico, a Hoxton brewer, who developed a popular ‘nut browne’ ale around the same time. In the tenth century the land was a swamp, Bulinga Fen, into which the Tyburn stream drained, and in the nineteenth century attained its modern-day look when Thomas Cubitt began development on earth brought by river from the excavations of St Katherine Dock, near the Tower, and created street upon street of stucco houses with little interruption and no greenery. The new Pimlico’s first residents contained a large proportion of artists, musicians and writers, including the composer Arthur Sullivan, the authors Joseph Conrad and George Eliot and the aesthete and designer Aubrey Beardsley, but bohemian Pimlico gradually disappeared during the twentieth century.

Cathedral Piazza

Westminster Cathedral

The Catholic cathedral for the north side of the Thames was designed by John Bentley in a Byzantine style with a striking striped campanile and built in 1895 to 1903 after several delays, Bentley being the third architect to be involved with the project. The first, Henry Clutton, who controversially was a relative of the powerful Catholic Cardinal Manning, the owner of the land, was removed following delays in raising the money to fund the building, resulting in Sir

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.