PLANNING
Whitehall mess
TERENCE BENDLXSON
Mr John Silkin, Minister of Public Building and Works, wants to rebuild a large chunk of Whitehall and is setting about it like a supermarket developer who has spied a nice _site in the high street of a cathedral town. The only difference is that Silkin Supermarkets Limited happens to be eyeing a prime site in the nation's high street and has the rare advantage of not needing to submit its proposals to somebody represent- ing the public interest.
This useful exemption means that Mr Silkin can cheerfully disregard the pleas of the Minister of Housing, not to mention those of the Greater London Council, that Norman Shaw's Scotland Yard is one of the country's major architectural monu- ments and ride roughshod over the judg- ment of the minister's advisory committee on historical buildings, chaired by Lord Holford, which is the highest body of expertise in the land in matters architec- tural. Mr Silkin has his own advisers but though expert in historic monuments they know little about Victorian architecture.
Opinion has not fully embraced our nine- teenth century heritage but the Victorian Society is adamant about the importance of the massive gothic keep that Shaw de- signed to stare moodily across the Thames just below Westminster Bridge. 'I think it is a building of world importance and irre- placeable.' It is the finest work of the most successful and famous of late Victorian architects and his only public building. No private developer would be allowed to pull it down in any circumstances. The Ministry of Housing has made this clear but the Ministry of Works is prepared to disregard it, Mrs Jane Fawcett, secretary of the society, says. But Silkin Supermarkets are not just bent on destroying bits of the country's heritage. They are proposing to let Home Office civil servants gobble up the only available place for a Parliamen- tary Centre where people from all over the country and all over the world could go to find out how Britain is governed. Knowing something about the way it is done that is not surprising, but that is another matter. The creation of a government centre was one of the most far-sighted suggestions in Sir Leslie Martin's 1965 Whitehall plan. Sir Leslie saw the need to make the work- ings of Parliament more explicit, to have a place where ordinary people could find out what the Government is doing. He re- cognised, as Mr Silkin appears not to do, that if democracy is to stay alive in Britain Parliament must adapt itself to the needs of a more inquiring and more concerned electorate by opening its doors. Silkin Supermarkets have seen there is no money to be made out of this and are concentrat- ing on the book-keeping profits that would result from squeezing the biggest possible block of offices on to their site. It is a measure of the architecture that the Royal Fine Art Commission found it necessary to call for radical alterations before they were prepared to countenance the building.
Nor is this the sum of the Government's efforts to disregard wider interests. So de- termined are the Ministries of Housing and Transport to keep the rebellious and de- monstrative populace at bay, that they have decided not to clear all the traffic out of
Parliament Square. Professor Colin Buch- anan, who worked with Sir Leslie Martin on the future of Whitehall, showed how this could be done but the ministries have deci- ded that they will keep a good flow of double-deckers thundering through the square. They believe this will make it more difficult for demonstrations to be organised outside Parliament.
This travesty of government stems from a mixture of parsimdny and lack of imag- ination. No doubt the fact that Ministers of Works change with the regularity of the weather has made things worse. As anyone who has anything to do with Parliament knows, the Palace of Westminster is bulg- ing at the seams. An me has to be almost senile before he gets a proper office and to get one to himself he virtually needs to be a leper.
The civil service in Whitehall is less badly overcrowded because successive govern- ments have rented additional offices all over central London in order to house their growing armies of administrators. But rent- ing offices is more expensive than owning them and it is obviously inconvenient to have departments scattered hither and yon. As it is, bits of the Ministry of Defence hang out beyond Holborn and Mr Cross- man's empire starts , at the Elephant and Castle.
This is the background to Mr Sillcin's pro- posal to house 4.000 Home Office civil ser- vants at the bottom of Whitehall where it turns into Parliament Street. People inter- ested in the proposed building and how it tits into its surroundings can see a very handsome model of it in the crypt of Inigo Jones Banqueting House opposite the Horse Guards until 2 January. However there is also a notable blank on the model just a.-ross from Big Ben in Bridge Street and next to the proposed Home-Office. This is where it is intended to provide more breath- ing space for MPS and a competition to design them a building will be promoted among Commonwealth architects in the New Year.
Despite the shortcomings of these pro-
posals it would be an exaggeration to say that a Stansted-like row is brewing up. Mr Silkin is too wary a man to let that happen. He is obviously keen to get on with the new building and the tunnel, but he is inviting comment on his plans and he says he has not ruled out the possibility of a public inquiry. He is prepared to concede this even though a ministry is only obliged by statute to 'consult' interested local authorities and Whitehall departments be. fore deciding whether or not its action is in the public interest. Evidently ministers have no qualms about being both advocates and judges of their own cases.
Other people are not so sure—and this explains why the Ombudsman has agreed to look into the matter at the request of Mr James Allason, MP. It is not that the White- hall proposals are unmistakably wrong or that the Government has been unusually secretive about them. Silkin Supermarkets Limited may turn out to be a firm with fine judgment of the public interest. Maybe the members of the Royal Fine Art Commission who believe that Scotland Yard could be refurbished and the architects who say that new and old could be married up at the bottom of -Whitehall without the loss of much usable space are wrong. Maybe it would be impossible to build a big new government office complex above Waterloo Station as Mr Ted Hollamby, the Lambeth borough architect, has suggested. The trouble is that we shall never know unless Mr Sil- kin orders an independent inquiry into the redevelopment of Whitehall.
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