Bulldozers in Arcadia
PERSONAL COLUMN PAUL GRINKE
Threatened railway stations always seem to bring the nation's blood to the boil. The storm over the Euston Arch, an unusually imperial gesture from the age of steam to the age of Pericles, alerted the commuter .belt as well as the Victorian Society to recent rumblings in high altitudes about King's Cross and St Pan- cras. But Victorian architecture has many capable advocates and, thanks to the impas- sioned pleas of John Betjeman on television, a broad popular appeal. When Keble College comes down we can begin to worry : meanwhile on the. Georgian front the prospect is less cheerful.
Walking through Lincoln's Inn Fields the other week after a fairly euphoric lunch I was brought down to earth with a jolt by the sight of the last three eighteenth century houses on the south side of the square being cheerfully demolished. Curbing one's natural instincts for pillage, dis- regarding the cooing exhortations of women's magazines to slip the foremen ten bob for the fanlights and a couple of yards of panelling, 1 looked hard for some convincing reason for their destruction. Slim and undeniably elegant, with pleasant ironwork and a fine regency balcony on the last bow-fronted house, they formed a quiet enclave set back some twenty yards from the road in their own cobbled pre-. cinct between the monolithic Royal College of Surgeons and the London Steak House in Wat- ney's revamped regency style. They weren't remarkable architecturally but they seemed per- fectly sound, had obviously enjoyed long tenan- cies as legal offices and could happily have continued in that manner. Their destruction was so insensate and pointless that one's mind was left numb: As offices or flats they would have been highly covetable, but as a sizeable area of land in central London they had to go.
This is by no means a unique case. Hogarth's house fortunately still exists in a precarious no- man's-land between the ever expanding Cherry Blossom factOry and the Great West Road, where it manages to preserve the feeling of Chiswick as a hard ride from the flickering lights of the metropolis. But in Charlotte Street Constable's house, later reverently inhabited by Rex Whistler, was offered for sale for a year before being torn down. William Blake's birth- place off Golden Square (and how appropriate a site) has been pulled down in the last few years and replaced by a dun-coloured office block brazenly sporting his name. No one would dare lay hands on Anne Hathaway's cottage, which proves a useful money-spinner,-but as an object of national pride or even historic interest it has comparatively little to offer. Whatever one feels about the LCC blue plaques which lovingly record the brief sojourns of Brazilian patriots and obscure politicians, it seems strange that we can sit back while speculators pull down the houses of two of our greatest artists.
Quite apart from sentimental associations of this kind, it seems senseless to allow the destruc- tion of the kind of houses which most people would be happy to live and work in. For space and elegance eighteenth century houses are hard to beat, and I would rather see the houses in Soho with their high panelled rooms used as clip joints, drinking clubs and tailors' cutting rooms than pulled down to make way for badly designed office blocks. But the problem is not simply one of a few houses of architectural merit or historic interest, it concerns the wanton destruction of whole areas of eighteenth century London. For living environments the eighteenth century architects, whether their plans were visionary like Adam's Adelphi Terrace or pic- turesque like Nash's Park Villages nestling against the giant orders of his terraces, or merely bourgeois monumental like Cubitt's Belgravia, all offer a unique answer to urban dwelling. On a humbler scale the builders of Bloomsbury and North London produced attractive houses in well-planned streets punctuated by open squares. In five years at the present rate of spoliation, enough holes will have appeared in the plan to justify the pulling down of the remaining houses and the appropriation of the squares, for very few of the houses can stand on their own as architecturally significant. Grosvenor Square, a sad travesty of eighteenth century grandeur, boasted until last August one remaining pri- vate house: so anomalous that for years it had seemed almost to beg to be put out of its misery.
Two recent scandals have fortunately brought the problem before the public eye. Pitt Place at Epsom made painfully evident the loopholes in the preservation system. As a listed building it was theoretically invulnerable, but sufficient neglect made the preservation order untenable. The possibility of a ludicrous £100 fine for disregarding a building preservation order is hardly a deterrent to the determined speculator. Great Ormond Street is perhaps a more serious case, since an integral and very beautiful part of the Bloomsbury building complex is
threatened: here Rugby school, which owns a large Bloomsbury estate, is appealing against the ot_c preservation order and one can only hope the appeal fails. This is one of the few areas in which the various semi-private organisations —such as the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, itself housed in Great Ormond Street, the Georgian Society and the National Trust—can do some good as organs of publicity. As private societies they have no legislative authority and virtually no power out- side their fund-raising capacity and their ability to raise a public outcry. The National Trust, the biggest of the group, can only accept or reject houses offered to them with a suitable endowment, usually a prohibitive factor, or a potential tourist appeal which will pay for the upkeep. In situations which concern whole areas of historic building they have their hands tied.
This is where the new Civic Amenities Act, introduced as a private member's Bill by Dun- can Sandys, should prove invaluable. The Act tells local authorities to designate whole areas as being of historic interest or having amenity value. The amenity value clause is brilliant since, however blind one may be to the beauties of Georgian architecture, the veriest simpleton can recognise the sheer manpower value of open squares where secretaries can tan their leathery hides and eat their sandwiches. Furthermore the Act now makes the fine for infringement of an order unlimited, with the additional possi- bility of imprisonment for a really flagrant breach.
The drawback of the Act is its lack of follow- through; it is easy to enjoin local authorities to exercise existing planning control with due regard for the character of an area, but in many cases there is no one apart from the borough surveyor to recognise Or designate such an area with amenity value as worth saving. Theoretic- ally they can call on the Ministry of Housing, which has a panel of experts to give advice each month, but the likelihood of anyone on call at the Ministry being acquainted with the particu- lar demands of some distant locality is remote and the Act does not stipulate that this assist- ance must be given. The Ministry itself sends round people to list individual buildings but has no interest in areas. To throw the problem back at the local authorities is a typical piece of legis- lative buck-passing, and until there is a fully constituted central authority which can desig- nate both individual houses and areas no great advance on the present system is going to be made.
The problem of single houses which have somehow escaped the preservation net can some- times be met by an inspired purchaser. William Kent's brilliant 44 Berkeley Square, which has been modestly converted by Mr Aspinall into a discreet gaming club, is a good example. But generally the difficulty of making economic use of old buildings is the speculator's greatest weapon. Houses of merit tend to fall on their feet but what must concern us is the fate of streets, terraces and whole areas of sober envi- able housing which have been by-passed by the authorities. The fate or probable fate of Spital Square and Brunswick Square, Angel Lane and Swedenborg Square, and the partly decimated Ely Place, is too recent to be shrugged off as an example of the piecemeal erosion of London by the uncomprehending planners and speculators of the early years of this century. If anything is to be preserved for our own and future generations' use and enjoyment it must be done now before it is too late.
Previous page
