ARCHITECTURE
Big Ideas
BIG ideas about how to change and improve the West End of London have not been plentiful during the last twenty years. On the official side there has been a positive dearth of them, which is what makes Sir Leslie Martin's report on Whitehall so welcome. There is about it a -scale of thinking that must surely have gained the approval of a Nash or a Cubitt.
At first sight the vast structure that Sir Leslie envisages running from the embankment to St. James's Park may seem megalomaniac—it would contain several government departments—but it is broken into parts in a far more humane way than the existing Victorian building which conceals the separate identities of the Treasury, the Department of Economic Affairs and -the Ministry of Housing. Furthermore, it is only' a detail of his plan.
It is only when one begins to think about the by-pass roads which are proposed to free White- hall and Parliament Square of their thunderous girdles of cars, lorries and buses, that doubts begin to creep in—not because the theory of by-pass roads can be faulted, but because the actual building bears so little relationship to the resources that are likely to be available in the next twenty years. It is hard not to get the feeling that Colin Buchanan, whose report on traffic accompanied Sir Leslie's plan, was indulg- ing in an academic exercise, if not in fantasy, when he showed how central London might absorb even more vehicles than at present, and at the same time be transformed into a tolerable place to live and work in. His determination not to be anti-car, coupled with his special concern for the quality of life, inevitably led him to pro- pOSe 'a grid of super-streets, many of them on the line of existing ones, but gigantically widened, perhaps to eight lanes, so that they could bear the brunt of the traffic and leave the places in between in peace and quiet.
But even before the publication of the White- hall report the Greater London Council and the Ministry of Transport were both thinking, and in private saying, that they would be lucky to get the money to build the motorway box which has been proposed to ring central London, let alone a network of high-powered roads inside it. One is left to conclude that when Charles Pannell, Minister of Public Building and Works, said, in welcoming the plan, that he expected it to take fifty years to complete, he really meant what he said. It would have been more honest if, instead of welcoming Professor Buchanan's laudable efforts to show how a few more people could drive about comfortably in London (even a grid of super-roads would not enable e■teryone to do so), and asking the GLC to have a look at it, he had pointed out it was a long-term dream.
The immediate need in central London is not, after all, for a few people to drive about in personal vehicles, but for everyone to get from place to place more quickly than they can now. This would be possible through a much im- proved bus service on the existing roads, if the buses were not blocked by cars. Some method is therefore needed to encourage people to leave their cars outside central London, whether they
,'Is that ALL you can imagine when you,imagine, the Great Society=-free beer?' are commuting, shopping or on business, and to travel instead in buses and taxis. This would reverse the vicious spiral in which increasinglY clogged roads make buses slower, more costly to operate and less convenient to use, thereby encouraging people to try desperately to ' use their cars. The Government is toying with the idea of expensive extra licences for vehicles being used in big cities, but it will make their accept- ance harder to achieve by welcoming grandiose road plans in the Whitehall report, and giving the impression that the short-term prospects for cars in cities are good. '
Sir Leslie Martin's view is that his plan is an example. It insists on the need to reform London in large chunks, in order to give the modern city a coherence comparable with that which can still be found in. Belgravia and Bloomsbury, and other estates that were built according to a single design conception. The result of not doing this can be seen everywhere: glaring examples are Victoria Street and the EustOn Road where it crosses Tottenham Court Road. In both cases the old form of the continuous street—the rue corridor —has been broken. In its place have appeared streets made up of towers set on low platforms —someone has called them matchboxes on muffins. These are perfectly acceptable architec- tural forms, and can be welded into a new order, as Notting Hill Gate shows for all that it is split by traffic. But if a number of different sites are being built on, by a variety of owners and archi- tects, at different times, some three-dimensional & policy, some conception, some design idea, is necessary to hold things together. It is a concept of this kind that Sir Leslie Martin has provided for Whitehall, although in' the case of his pro- posed new government office building 'he has gone further and prepared what he calls an 'ideogram,' a sort of X-ray that shows the guts as well as the skin of the building.
However, one big idea leads inexorably to another, and Sir Leslie points an accusing finger at Trafalgar Square and the vast opportunity that is opened up by the prospect of Covent Garden market moving.' Trafalgar Square's troubles might be thought of as being solely the result of too much traffic, but the place has architectural weaknesses as well. This is apparent when one approaches it uphill from Whitehall. The National Gallery, being the piece de resistance, should look imposing and grand, like a castle on a hill. Instead its extreme width makes it look squat, a characteristic that is emphasised by the buildings, two new and one dating from the Ihirties, that poke up behind it like faces peering over an ornamental wall.
But Sir Leslie does not bother with trifles of this sort. He is not concerned with individual buildings but with urban structure, which is obviously why his eye has been attracted to Covent Garden. In one small diagram and a brief paragraph, he points out that the distance from Westminster Abbey to Trafalgar Square is about the same as that from Trafalgar Square to the ' British Museum, although few people realise this because of the maze that tills the second sector. Sir Leslie does not hint at driving a Champs, Elysees through the old market area, because it is not vistas that he is keen on opening up. It is relationships. Is there not good reason, he asks, for, binding together Parliament, the Abbey, Whitehall, the National Gallery, the National Theatre and Opera House, the British Museum and national library? Once the question has been asked and answered, the idea might be designed in a dozen different ways. The most important thing was to grasp that the possibility exists.
TERENCE BENDIRSON
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