Bizarre London Page 4

  Once considered the jewel in the crown of post-war public housing, the Alton Estate in Wandsworth was an attempt to re-create Le Corbusier’s visionary but ill-conceived Unité d’Habitation in London. Instead, it was quickly recognised by film-makers as the perfect backdrop for dystopian dramas such as Fahrenheit 451 and some of the seedier scenes in TV’s Minder and The Sweeney. (Another utopian vision, Thamesmead, was similarly used as the seedy backdrop to A Clockwork Orange.)

  Architectural modernist Erno Goldfinger famously moved his family to north Kensington and into his brutalist, concrete Trellick Tower – but only briefly before they returned to a lovely house overlooking leafy Hampstead Heath. Today, however, despite suffering many of the construction problems common to 1950s’ and 1960s’ system-built blocks, apartments here are highly sought-after and can command prices of around half a million pounds.

  London’s Maddest Buildings Never Built

  1638 – The New Royal Palace

  Inigo Jones’s scheme to replace the old Palace of Whitehall was so vast that, had Charles I not been executed thereby rendering it redundant, it would have occupied a vast square stretching from Trafalgar Square down to the Ministry of Defence in one direction and in the other from the riverbank to halfway along the Mall.

  1666 – The Other Monument

  Much of the success of Wren’s monument to the Great Fire depends on the elegance and simplicity of its fluted Doric column. Wren favoured something far more elaborate, however, and initially planned to top it with a 30-ft sculpture of a phoenix. Somewhat clumsily this was to signify the city’s rebirth, but it was unwieldy and expensive – and potentially highly dangerous as the outstretched wings would have caught the wind.

  1800 – London Double Bridge

  George Dance proposed a pair of bridges instead of one, placed 100 yards apart, with drawbridge centre sections in order to allow large vessels through and decorative Egyptian detailing to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon in the Battle of the Nile two years earlier.

  1815 – Trafalgar Square Pyramid

  Intended to be the tallest structure in nineteenth-century London, this twenty-two-storey, 364-ft behemoth was designed by Philip and Matthew Cotes Wyatt. It would have covered the whole of Trafalgar Square but served no real purpose beyond commemorating the dead from the Napoleonic campaigns, and reinforcing our superiority over the French.

  1824 – Grand National Cemetery

  Covering more than 150 acres, at least forty of which were contained within an astonishing series of cloisters, Francis Goodwin’s plan to redevelop either Shooters Hill or Primrose Hill as a ‘city for the dead’ included a replica of the Parthenon at its centre and no fewer than four copies of the Athenian Tower of the Winds.

  1825 – Hyde Park Palace

  Seeking to curry favour with an extravagant George IV, Frederick W. Trench MP proposed building a new royal home in Hyde Park with a two-mile ceremonial drive linking it to St Paul’s Cathedral. A full 200 ft wide, and ramrod straight, the latter would have required the destruction of much of Mayfair, all of Covent Garden and most of the ancient buildings of Middle and Inner Temple. Colonel Trench admitted it was a ‘splendid impossibility’ but still recommended the idea to the Duke of Wellington.

  1832 – Roman Colosseum

  Modelled on the original, and by no means any smaller, John Goldicutt’s massive rotunda was another design intended to occupy the whole of Trafalgar Square, this time to provide a permanent home for many of the learned societies now billeted at Somerset House and Burlington House on Piccadilly.

  1861 – Crystal Palace Monolith

  Following the Prince Consort’s death, and with no clear plans for the future of Crystal Palace, it was suggested the whole thing be retrieved from Sydenham and restored to Hyde Park by upending it to create a 1,000 ft-high glass obelisk.

  1872 – High-Level Tower Bridge

  Using hydraulics to winch the entire roadway more than 80 ft up into the air, Sidengham Duer’s design was so far ahead of its time that, had it been built, it is highly doubtful many Victorians would have trusted the technology sufficiently to climb aboard.

  1875 – Embankment Opera House

  A naked attempt to out-Scala La Scala, this was to include its own Underground station and a tunnel linking it to the Palace of Westminster so that MPs could listen to ‘beautiful music instead of dull debates’. Unfortunately, the foundations flooded badly, costing a fortune to rectify, and when that left insufficient funds to complete the project the £103,000 building was demolished at a cost of £3,000 and New Scotland Yard built on the site.

  1889 – Non-Leaning Tower of Pisa

  Constructed of solid granite, weighing an estimated 200,000 tons and costing more than £1,000,000, this replica of the Italian icon was designed to stand on a hilltop in Wembley. That it was never built is just one of the reasons why the name of architect Albert Brunel has never quite rivalled that of Isambard Kingdom Brunel or his son Marc.

  1910 – King Edward VII Square

  Requiring the wholesale destruction of Piccadilly Circus, John Murray’s plans to commemorate the dead king would have replaced the world-famous figure of Eros2 with a giant mounted statue of the late monarch and a heavily Edwardian ‘National Opera House’ in place of the area’s cheerfully vulgar neon displays.

  1918 – Selfridge’s Mausoleum

  Shortly after opening his magnificent new emporium on Oxford Street, Harry Gordon Selfridge commissioned Philip Tilden to design a monolithic tower to go on the top complete with a Greek-style temple at the summit and an honour guard of stone lions. Tilden came up with the goods, a structure that would have been more than 200 ft high, but warned the store owner that the weight of it would almost certainly cause the building beneath it to collapse.

  1931 – King’s Cross Airport

  By placing a six-spoked, mile-wide ‘wheel’ above the station, Charles Glover’s dream was to provide London with three intersecting runways. The idea was for plutocrats and the leisured rich to ascend into a bright technological future while the rest of London battled it out in the traffic down below.

  1943 – Tower Bridge in Glass

  The slightly mad brainchild of painter W. F. C. Holden, who thought the old bridge dowdy and old-fashioned and wished to see this much-loved London landmark re-created in streamlined glass and steel. He argued that it would save painting and repainting the old one, but fortunately with a war on no one took him seriously.

  1967 – Regent Street Monorail

  Determined to wreck what little elegance remains in the curving sweep of Regent Street, in the late 1960s the Greater London Council seriously considered building heavy concrete stanchions down the centre of the street in order to run two overhead monorails from Piccadilly up to Oxford Circus.

  FIFTEEN FANTASTIC FOLLIES

  Stoke Newington Pumping Station, N4

  Based – pretty loosely, it has to be said – on Stirling Castle, the pumping station brought clean water into north London from Great Amwell in Hertfordshire. These days, it is an indoor mountaineering centre, which in its own way is just as bizarre as a Scottish castle in a London suburb.

  Caledonian Clock Tower, N7

  The last surviving portion of the once vast Caledonian Metropolitan Cattle Market is an Italianate, white-stone edifice. It towers over neighbouring playing fields and council estates, and dates back to 1855.

  Holly Village, Highgate, N6

  Baroness Burdett-Coutts was a notable nineteenth-century philanthropist, who built homes for the poor of east London and a vast covered market (now gone) because she felt sorry for the cold, wet costermongers. In Highgate, she built a small cluster of Gothic cottages around a green, but these were for the better off and today command the kind of high prices that individualistic houses in cities warrant.

  Crocker’s Folly, Aberdeen Place, NW8

  Convinced a new railway terminal would be built at St John’s Wood, a nineteenth-century speculator of this name built
a large railway hotel only to see the trains continue all the way into London. He lost his shirt, and his Crown Hotel – now semi-derelict – has been known by its cruel nickname ever since.

  Trobidge Castle, Buck Lane, NW9

  In the 1920s, architect Ernest Trobridge pioneered an efficient means of building modern prefabricated houses, but his personal preference was for something more traditional. Acquiring land in Kingsbury, he built a series of mock-medieval flats and some fake Tudor cottages, none of them at all convincing but quaint rather than queer and quite sought-after.

  Queen’s Tower, SW7

  At nearly 300 ft, London’s tallest folly is also its least known, being largely invisible to anyone walking by. It was designed by T. E. Colcutt (architect of the Savoy Hotel) as part of the Imperial Institute in the heyday of ‘Albertopolis’. Today, it is the only part still standing, marooned in the middle of Imperial College and best seen from Kensington Gardens.

  St Antholin’s Spire, Round Hill, SE26

  With its unusual octagonal spire, St Antholin’s was regarded as one of Wren’s finest city churches but was nevertheless pulled down in 1875 to make way for Queen Victoria Street. The spire was rescued and found its way to a country estate in Kent, only to be swallowed up as London expanded southwards and a suburb grew up around it.

  Obelisk, Tibbet’s Corner, SW15

  Commemorates the erection in the 1770s of London’s first fire-proof house, which had metal plates inserted between the floorboards to retard the spread of any flames. The house sadly disappeared long ago and – as is only to be expected – is said locally to have burned to the ground.

  Farm House, Farm Street, W1

  Once home to actress Gloria Swanson and Thelma Lady Furness, who introduced Wallis Simpson to the Prince of Wales. This mock-Tudor house is only 100 years old but was built using genuinely old stone flags and authentically medieval doors and panelling, and so looks the part.

  22–24 Leinster Gardens, W2

  No more real than a film set, the façades of two typical Bayswater terraced houses were built to conceal a railway line running behind them. Today, this forms part of the District Line, but before electrification the large opening behind the houses allowed for smoke from steam locomotives to escape the shallow tunnels.

  Burton’s Tent, North Worple Way, Mortlake

  In an otherwise ordinary cemetery, the tomb of the explorer Sir Richard Burton takes the form of an Arab tent decorated with a combination of Christian and Moorish symbols and with a small window at the rear for the curious to peer in. His wife would have preferred Westminster Abbey, but with Sir Richard having abandoned Christianity (and embraced pornography with considerable enthusiasm) the church authorities were not to be persuaded.

  The Rotunda, Green Hill, SE18

  For many years a splendid home for ‘the military curiosities usually preserved in the Repository of the Royal Regiment of Artillery’ – that is to say, hundreds of old guns – this charming building was designed by John Nash to celebrate the defeat of Napoleon. It takes the form of a mock tent, which originally stood in St James’s Park.

  Royal Naval College Gates, SE10

  Built to mark Admiral Lord Anson’s successful near-four-year circumnavigation in the 1740s, the piers are surmounted by a pair of globes showing the terrestrial and celestial spheres. Now, sadly, too corroded to read, they are 6 ft in diameter and cost more than 40 guineas apiece at a time when a cabin boy would have had to have worked for twenty years to earn a similar sum.

  The Bathhouse, Bishopsgate Churchyard, EC4

  In recent years housing a café, an Indian restaurant and an Italian pizzeria, one of the City’s most curious little buildings was originally an elaborately tiled Turkish hamam until the Victorian fad for steam baths gradually faded.

  Severndroog Castle, Shooter’s Hill, SE18

  Hidden among the trees in Oxleas Wood is a triangular Gothic tower built to commemorate the life of Commodore Sir William James, Bt. (1721–83). An officer of the East India Company, its evocative name is an Anglicised reference to his conquest of the Indian fortress of Savarnadurg (off the coast of Goa) and the successful routing of the pirates operating in its vicinity.

  ____________

  1 In fact, the Square Mile boasts two more Wren churches that are being reused in this way. The tower of St Alban Tower, Wood Street, was converted into a bijou pied-à-terre in 1985 and, at the time of writing, the conversion of the Grade 1-listed St Mary Somerset is under way. The queens, incidentally, are Isabella of France, Marguerite of France and Joan of Scotland.

  2 In fact, it’s not actually Eros (see Chapter 6 for details).

  4

  Spy’s London

  ‘The Secret Intelligence Service I knew occupied dusky suites of little rooms opposite St James’s Park Tube Station.’

  John le Carré

  Famous Buildings with Secret Histories

  Sir Winston Churchill’s wartime hotline to the White House required so much equipment to encrypt and transmit messages across the Atlantic that there was insufficient space for it all at the Cabinet War Rooms beneath Whitehall. Instead, some 55 tons of special, top-secret technology was housed beneath Oxford Street in the basement of Selfridges, the store even taking on a detachment of armed marines to take care of security.

  Throughout the Cold War, the grounds of Holy Trinity Church in Knightsbridge provided the location for so-called ‘dead letter drops’, a safe place where the KGB could leave secret messages for Soviet agents based in the capital. (Brompton Oratory nearby fulfilled a similar function.)

  In the 1940s, Electra House, a huge Edwardian edifice that occupies much of one side of Moorgate in the City, housed the mysterious ‘Dept EH’. This was a division of the wartime Special Operations Executive (SOE) and was charged with bugging foreign embassies and producing and disseminating propaganda designed to undermine enemy operations in Europe.

  Claridge’s in Brook Street, Mayfair – long popular with foreign royalty and Heads of State – was reportedly used to test a device developed by the Post Office for MI5. This enabled a telephone to be used to eavesdrop on conversations in the rooms of particular guests at the hotel, but unfortunately the scheme was leaked to the Russians before it could be put into operation.

  Overlooking the Mall, 2 Carlton Gardens was the location for a meeting in 1954 where MI6 and the CIA agreed to cooperate on the construction of a tunnel beneath the Berlin Wall. The idea was to intercept hundreds of thousands of telephone calls made to, from or within the Soviet sector, but unfortunately the existence of the 1,500-ft-long tunnel was immediately blown by George Blake (see page 49) who was present at the meeting.

  REAL PLACES WITH FICTIONAL SPY CONNECTIONS

  At the foot of Westminster Bridge, set into the plinth of the South Bank Lion, a doorway (which exists) leads to Vauxhall Cross Station (which doesn’t) in the 007 thriller, Die Another Day.

  Freemasons’ Hall in Great Queen Street, WC2, was used as the MI5 headquarters in the television series Spooks.

  Boodle’s in St James’s Street, SW1, is the model for Blade’s, the gentleman’s club where James Bond lunches frugally with his boss, Sir Miles Messervy (‘M’).

  In Billion Dollar Brain, the opening sequence was shot near King’s Cross Station, with 297 Pentonville Road standing in for Harry Palmer’s office.

  In Die Another Day, Bond squares up to Gustav Graves in an (imaginary) fencing salon at the Reform Club in Pall Mall, SW1.

  Blythe House, Blythe Road, W14, provided the setting for the Circus, the MI6 headquarters in the film adaptation of John le Carré’s novel Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Originally the London headquarters of the Post Office Savings Bank, the late Victorian building is now used for storing surplus exhibits from the Science Museum, British Museum and the V&A.

  TEN TWENTIETH-CENTURY TRAITORS

  1933 – Norman Baillie-Stewart

  Court-martialled at Chelsea Barracks under the Official Secrets Act, in 1933 Baillie-S
tewart was found guilty of selling military secrets to a foreign power. Having reportedly fallen in love with a German woman, and deciding to take German citizenship, he had been persuaded to spy for them instead and had stolen some experimental tank blueprints from army files at Aldershot.

  In wartime, he would undoubtedly have been sentenced to the death penalty for this, but instead he faced a theoretical maximum of 140 years in jail on a total of ten charges. In the end, he spent just five years locked in the Tower of London – the last Briton to serve a sentence there – before fleeing to mainland Europe before the war started. He died in Dublin in 1966, having changed his name to James Scott.

  1940 – Archibald Maule Ramsay

  The only Member of Parliament to be interned during the Second World War, Ramsay was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards after Eton and Sandhurst. Elected to Westminster in 1931, he was generally well liked but never entirely trusted and rose no higher than a government position on the Potato Marketing Board.

  In the late 1930s he began to voice increasingly pro-Nazi views and, like many others who shared his views at the time, became convinced that the Conservative Party was being controlled by a Jewish cabal. His response was to establish the rival Right Club and, later, to attempt to reinstate a thirteenth-century law introduced by Edward I banning all Jews from England. In 1940, after becoming involved with a suspected spy at the US Embassy, he was incarcerated in Brixton Prison.