Victoria Embankment, London

Streaky bacon

Looking at Google Earth on a relative’s mobile the other day and marvelling at how much of London we could see, we chanced upon the Victoria Embankment and I was reminded how, whenever I’m at that end of Westminster Bridge I turn away from the Houses of Parliament (magnificent as they are) and look at these two buildings by the river. They were designed by Norman Shaw as New Scotland Yard – the North Building (right) first, followed by the South. The Metropolitan Police moved into the North Building in 1890, and into the South Building in 1906, after which the two blocks remained the headquarters of the force until 1967. They’re now parliamentary offices.*

When the first building began to go up at the end of the 1880s, this style of architecture was still new. People were rather baffled by it. They’d spent much of the 19th century being told that there was a ‘battle of styles’ between Gothic and Classical. Nobody won the battle, but the Victorians built hundreds of Gothic churches and thousands of Classical secular buildings – plus a few buildings in other recognisable styles of the past, from Romanesque to Renaissance. This office block did not seem to be in a single recognisable style at all. It has Classical details around the windows; the roofs look like something from the French Renaissance; it has polychrome masonry but not of the type used on some Gothic buildings;  the gables have Jacobean decoration; the corner towers – what? – French or Scottish.

Contemporaries were worried by this and anxiously asked Shaw what style he was aiming for. He replied that he was not really interested in style, or in designing facades. What he was interested in was character.† So he produced a hybrid that nowadays is sometimes referred to as ‘free style’. Once people got over the bafflement, this way of building caught on, and there are plenty of well built, handsome, eye-catching buildings, put up in the late-19th and early-20th centuries in this hybrid mode. They often have a mix of brickwork and pale stone, so I think of them as ‘streaky bacon’ buildings. Shaw’s Scotland Yard also has a very solid-looking lower portion in granite, as if the designer wanted to ensure that the whole thing was on the strongest possible footing.

Nowadays we are not so fazed by a 19th-century building in a ‘free’ style. We can look at it and appreciate the artful patterns of the multi-coloured masonry (look at those chimneys), the ornate gables, the variety of window sizes, the relationship between the massive buildings and the corner towers with their delicate ogee cupolas. It’s a design that’s as effective now, after postmodernism and all, as it has ever been.

- - - - -

* The Metropolitan Police, after various moves, now occupy the 1930s Curtis Green building on the Embankment, just out of my shot to the right. The Curtis Green building is now called New Scotland Yard, while the streaky bacon buildings are known as the Norman Shaw Buildings.

† For more on the buildings, and Shaw’s views on them, see the excellent biography by Andrew Saint, Richard Norman Shaw, Yale UP, 1976.

Embankment, London

Water gate revelation

I used to work in Covent Garden and sometimes, especially in summer, there was a strong temptation to cross the Strand and make for the refreshment provided by Gordon’s Wine Bar in Villiers Street. After a glass or two one could walk back via an architectural detour, through the remains of the Adelphi perhaps, or across the Embankment Gardens, past this monumental gateway, a reminder of a London long gone.

Before the Victoria Embankment was built in 1862, the gateway stood on the river bank. It was built in 1626 as the water gate to York House, home of George Villiers 1st Duke of Buckingham (whose name and title are commemorated in the street names hereabouts). The builder was the appropriately named Nicholas Stone, Buckingham’s master mason and an associate of Inigo Jones, the man who had introduced Palladian architecture to England a few years earlier.

Stone’s water gate is a vigorous, almost restless, design with its banded columns, its big keystones, and its busy cornice jutting in and out. Less restrained than most of Inigo Jones’s rather severe surviving buildings, it seems to look forward to the more baroque style of the late-17th century. And stranded in its garden it looks even odder than it must have done in the 1620s. One up to the London County Council (also long gone) for preserving it.