Spectacular Vernacular review
Perhaps more than any other major city, London lacks an architectural plan. What we have today is an agglomeration of the architecture, fashion, whims and the creative and destructive forces of nature, monarchs and developers over 2000 years. Christopher Wren thought it was a mess and would have taken the opportunity afforded by redevelopment after the Great Fire to sweep the whole medieval jumble of streets away. You can still look at his sketches and see what might have been: a modern grid of wide boulevards and symmetrical buildings. But unlike Baron Haussman, who was able to raze and rebuild old Paris, or the architects of Manhattan who were starting from scratch, nobody was allowed to remodel London.
We pay the price in confusing road systems, City streets not wide enough to squeeze a lorry down and unaccountable dead ends, but the greater gain is the diversity of styles and eras of building that sit side by side - and those that have survived, somehow, amidst the centuries of tearing down and building ever higher. Spectacular Vernacular*, by David Long, is a new book celebrating 100 of the capital’s ’strangest and most enigmatic buildings’, many of them in the East End and the City. Some are open to the public (if you know who to ask), while others remain strictly off limits (and the powers-that-be would rather you didn’t know of their existence at all). But many are so familiar that we no longer stop to look at them.
Last week we looked at the Tower Subway, the existence of this historic venture evidenced only by a small brick pillar box on Tower Hill - what was a tube line is now a conduit for TV and other cables. One of London’s most grandiloquent buildings was built to celebrate the city’s domination of maritime trade - just as London started to decline. Gaze over from Tower Hill and you’ll see the Port of London Authority building ‘baroque gone berserk’ as one architectural historian put it. As it was going up, between 1912-22, London’s greatest days as a port were already in the past. Head east to Orchard Place in E14, and there is a unique memento of the Thames busier maritime past. The Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse has been dominating the wharf since 1864 - as London’s only genuine lighthouse. That’s not surprising perhaps, as there’s little risk of a ship running aground in fog on the Isle of Dogs. The facility was a testing station in fact, where Trinity House developed new lights for their lighthouses and lightships. Today, it has been converted into a permanent ’sound art’ installation.
It’s a recurring theme - old London buildings being converted to new roles. One of the more remarkable sits in Bishopsgate Churchyard in EC2. G Harold Elphick’s wafer-thin Moorish building (it had to slip in between two existing buildings) once served as an entrance to a complex of Turkish baths beneath street level, built for Victorian entrepreneurs the Forder brothers. Today, this Arab confection serves as an Italian restaurant.
While the City of London is relentlessly redeveloped, the institutions (and many of their buildings remain. Whittington College (endowed by Lord Mayor Dick Whittington) survives on College Hill, EC4, decorated with lavish 17th century stone pediments. Despite the value of even the smallest footprint of land in the City, 38 of the City Livery companies still survive within the Square Mile. Apothecaries Hall, on Blackfriars Lane EC4 has a beautifully stuccoed facade and a 13th century well within; the Armourers Hall in Coleman Street EC2 has an elegant neo-Classical design dating from 1840. The Fishmongers Company had the dubious distinction of being the first of the livery companies to lose its building to the Great Fire of 1666; its present home, though, is a magnificent neo-Classical pile gazing over the Thames from King William Street, EC4.
With the Great Fire (and numerous smaller ones), redevelopment and the Blitz, it is a miracle that anything has survived. But which of the buildings being raised today will stand the test of time? Long admires the boldness of the Swiss Re Building (the Gherkin), which already has iconic status, seeming to appear in every new movie filmed in London. Curves make another entry with City Hall, on the South Bank. And the writer makes some brave pitches for East End edifices. He chooses the Fat House, on Garner Street, E2, built as a mix of family home and workshop by architect Sean Griffiths. He also goes for the stormwater pumping station in Stewart Street, Blackwall. Does this jolly modernist facility, built in 1988, have the stuff to rival Joseph Bazalgette’s sumptuous Byzantine pump house at Abbey Mills? Only time will tell.
*Spectacular Vernacular by David Long, £19.99 Sutton Publishing, ISBN 0750941871