Mr. Cotton Speaks
Then, on October 27, Mr. Cotton called a press conference, and all hell broke loose. For the first time the full horror of what he was proposing was made public. Photographs of the thing were Produced (one appears on our cover)—a building of which the massing appears to have been done by a man with absolutely no sense of proportion whatever. A huge, squat, square tower is thumped down on to a podium that does not even pretend to be architecture; it Merely follows the line of the pavement to rho pemissible extent, and its facing looks like a double row of teeth. The whole central Lace of this tower is blank of windows or anything else except huge slabs of advertisement. On the top there is a revolving crane, extending to ninety- three feet, which it is intended to use to pick up prefabricated slabs of advertisement from the street below. This, too, it is intended to illuminate. And yet it seemed that London—and indeed Britain—was faced with a fait accompli, and that nothing could stop the Monster of Piccadilly Circus from rising to its full misshapen height. (It may be observed in passing that a kind of per- verse ingenuity must be possessed by designers who can make a building 172 feet high look squat.) Amid the gathering storm, one or two further odd details came to light. The crane, it seemed, was quite new to the Council's Architect, though the close collaboration between him and the developers had apparently been satisfactorily maintained. Mr. Bennett, the Council's Chief Architect, went on BBC Television on November 19 and said, '1 think you can say—really we can all say—that all the implications, the defects, and all the planning considerations in Pic- cadilly Circus have had the most careful con- sideration by the officers and the Committee of the Council.' He hedged on the question of Mr. Cotton's photographs, saying, 'I don't think people should be misled by a perspective drawing which is quite different in its form and character and impression, together with the type of crane that's been shown on the top of it.' But, most revealing of all, Mr. Bennett hedged on his own depart- ment's plan for the comprehensive development of Piccadilly Circus, saying that 'it is not a scheme that people should take with finality. It is only a general exercise setting out possibilities, before the officers of the Council approach any developer in the area. It mustn't be taken in the slightest as any final answer.' Mr. Bennett, in fact, appeared to be preparing the ground for an announcement that the Council was abandoning any intention of developing the area as a whole, and in view of the fact that that, to all intents and purposes, is what the Council has done, the sooner he makes, it the better.
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