Mr. Cotton Appears
Anyhow, the speculators moved in. Two blocks in particular attracted their attention. One was the Monico site, a roughly triangular block to the north, the apex of the triangle pointing on to the Circus; the other was a block adjacent to the Lon- don Pavilion (the freehold of which, it will be re- called, is owned by the LCC); this runs round Scott's Restaurant from Coventry Street to Great Windmill Street. The Monico site was acquired by a company named Central Commercial Properties; 93 per cent. of this company's ordinary capital is owned by a company called City Centre Proper- ties, which has various other assets, including other companies, and properties in Birmingham and London. The king-pin of this group is Mr. Jack Cotton, a property speculator, who has nineteen other directorships, almost without exception in firms engaged in the same type of business. Mr. Cotton has done much building in Birmingham, little if any of which is said to have improved the look of that city, and it is his groups who are responsible for much of the unimaginative and uncoordinated building in the new Notting Hill Gate; it is worth pointing out that London County Council architects and plan- ners, at public expense, have been working with the architects for this area trying to make a, worthy scheme out of what could only have been so made if it had been developed by a sufficiently coura- geous council, comprehensively and publicly. Mr. Cotton is financially backed, in his current plan, by the Legal and General Assurance Society Ltd., and they have combined to form a development company for the site called Island (Piccadilly) Development Ltd.
It is appropriate here, at the cost of a considerable digression, to say something about Mr. Cotton's architects. These are a firm called Cotton, Ballard and Blow. The Cotton of the firm is the same Mr. Jack Cotton; he has no architec- tural qualifications. The Blow is a Registered (not Chartered) Architect. The Ballard is dead. Rule 5(b) of the Code of Professional Conduct of the Royal Institute of British Architects states :
A member or Student must not be a director of a firm or company carrying on business as auctioneers or house and estate agents or trading in materials used in or whose activities are other- wise connected with the building industry or trading in land or building for profit.
Messrs. Cotton, Ballard and Blow, it seems, are not contravening this rule, because Mr. Blow, and the other qualified architects of the firm, do not themselves carry on business forbidden under the rule, while Mr. Cotton (who does) is not an architect; since the rule applies to indivi- duals, not to firms, they are all as much in the clear as the late Mr. Ballard. Nevertheless, as Mr. J. M. Richards, the editor of the Architectural Review, pointed out in a BBC talk on November 30:
It seems to me all wrong that the architecture of a building--especially so important a build- ing as this—should be in the hands of a firm whose chief interest in the project is financial. This is something the Architects' Registration Council should surely look into, because it is liable to undermine the objectivity which the architect as a professional man should always
possess. He should be in a position to help his client make responsible decisions even when they may seem to conflict with the client's own interests, financial or otherwise.
here are consultants; but whatever improve- ems consultants may make to a building, if it is undamentally a bad building it will remain a bad wilding. As Mr. Richards went on to point out: . . . it must be emphatically said that you can't create good architecture by tinkering with some- thing that's basically second-rate.
The LCC might perhaps consider making it a ractice to insist that the firms of architects ith whom it deals should have no financial terest in the buildings for whose erection e Council must give planning permission.) efore leaving the subject of practices which, ough perfectly legal, may well be considered ndesirable, we should spare a moment's thought or Mr. Cyril Walker. Mr. Walker is a former aluer to the London County Council, and is n receipt of a very substantial pension from them. e is now, however, a director of two of Mr. otton's companies—City Centre Properties, td., and Central Commercial Properties, Ltd. is associations with County Hall, his knowledge $1' its planning and building operations, and his ide range of contacts in the appropriate depart- tients there, must all be invaluable to Mr. Cotton; Int they could well put Mr. Walker in art em- karrassing position.
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