Lost London, page 2
Between the two world wars, London sprang outwards in a flood of suburban development, enabled by automobility, an expanded public transport system, the availability of large quantities of land at reasonable prices (as a result of falling agricultural prices and the break-up of landed estates under a growing burden of death and estate duties), and the introduction of tax relief on mortgage interest payments.12 The scale and extent of interwar sprawl led to a growing appreciation for ‘Olde England’ and a patriotic notion of ‘heritage’ that was codified in the 1932 Town and Country Planning Act, which empowered local authorities to impose preservation orders on important buildings, subject to compensating the owners. Yet the changing metabolism of the metropolis, together with shifting patterns of production and consumption, meant that much of the existing fabric had to be replaced. Obsolescent industrial buildings were pulled down; small independent bakeries disappeared; old pubs were replaced by ‘improved’ pubs and roadhouses; stables were swept away to make space for filling stations; corner shops came down and department stores went up.13 Among the more distinguished casualties of the interwar period were John Soane’s Bank of England building in the City, Clifford’s Inn, Holborn (Chapter 4), the Foundling Hospital, Bloomsbury, the Royal Bethlem Hospital, Southwark, the Adelphi Terrace (Chapter 5) and the Hotel Cecil in the Strand, the Pantheon, Oxford Street (Chapter 6), and the London Institution, Finsbury Circus: all economically or functionally obsolescent. The relocated Crystal Palace, in Sydenham (Chapter 10), on the way to obsolescence, was lost to an accidental fire. In the 1920s it was losses to London’s distinctive squares and gardens that prompted public outrage, particularly the cases of Endsleigh Gardens (on the south side of Euston Road, where the carefully composed relationship between Bloomsbury, Euston Station and its famous Arch was ruined), and the gardens of Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, where residents found themselves staring at the back of a giant Carreras cigarette factory.
5 The General Post Office, St Martin’s Le Grand, demolished in 1912. 6 John Nash’s stucco terraces, Regent Street, demolished 1895–1927. Most shocking to architectural cognoscenti, though, was the loss of so many of the great West End mansions, and, in particular, the aristocratic houses of Mayfair. ‘Here rising land values and the high running costs for houses, which were occupied for only a few months of the year during the Season [the period when Parliament was in session, between late October and late May or early June], offered tempting opportunities for both impoverished peers and speculative developers.’14 Devonshire House, Piccadilly, a victim of crippling death duties, was replaced by a huge block of flats and American-style car showrooms. Dorchester House, on Park Lane, arguably the most distinguished private house in London, was demolished to make way for the luxurious new Dorchester Hotel. Similarly, Grosvenor House, also on Park Lane, was demolished to make way for Grosvenor House Hotel. Other losses included Chesterfield House, Mayfair, and Norfolk House, St James’s.15 Not everything was lost from these upscale town mansions: a lucrative trade in architectural salvage developed, whereby chimneypieces, doorcases, staircases and panelling were auctioned off. In some cases, the fittings and furniture of entire ‘period’ rooms were sold, often to buyers from overseas.16 When the central block and two wings of Robert Adam’s neoclassical Lansdowne House in Mayfair were demolished in 1930, for example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York purchased the dining room and reassembled it as the centrepiece of the museum’s British decorative arts galleries.
7 The Foundling Hospital, Bloomsbury, demolished 1928. The Second World War saw the loss, through air raids, of more than 70,000 of London’s buildings, the majority of which were residential structures.17 The philanthropic housing of the Roscoe Street Estate in St Luke’s (Chapter 18) is just one example. More than 5 million square metres of commercial and industrial floor space was also lost. Even today, some of the bricks-and-mortar casualties can be tracked by the silhouette traces of bombed-out buildings on the walls of their more fortunate neighbours, or by the presence of postwar buildings incongruously located in the midst of older structures.18 Inevitably, the losses included an extensive catalogue of architecturally, historically or culturally important buildings, as well as functionally significant but architecturally unremarkable structures like the Necropolis Railway Station at Waterloo (Chapter 12). Fifteen of Wren’s City churches were destroyed in the course of the Blitz, including Christ Church, Greyfriars (Chapter 1), St Mary Aldermanbury, St Mildred, Bread Street, St Clement Danes and St Dunstan-in-the-East. Ninety-one of the 701 churches of the Diocese of London were completely destroyed during the war, and the list of other important buildings lost to air raids includes the Great Synagogue of London, Aldgate; the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Elephant and Castle; Holland House, Kensington; Montagu House, Portman Square; Carlisle House, Soho Square; Serjeant’s Inn and the Inner Temple Library and Hall, Holborn; the Carlton Club, Pall Mall; and the Brewers’ Hall, the Clothworkers’ Hall and the Haberdashers’ Hall in the City. The LCC coordinated the clearance of bombed-out buildings, with contractors supplying ‘mattockmen’ (named after their pick-like tools) and ‘topmen’, the workers with the dangerous task of conducting demolition from the top of the ruins.19
Lost in Transition
In the early postwar years, the business of the demolition industry was driven by Patrick Abercrombie’s County of London Plan (1943) and its implementation by way of the Labour government’s radical Town and Country Planning Act (1947). Slums would be eradicated in a series of local Comprehensive Development Programmes, their former inhabitants rehoused in new council estates or in one of the New Towns located just beyond London’s new Green Belt. Altogether, 45,113 units were demolished in London’s slum clearance schemes between 1955 and 1964, followed by another 56,710 units between 1965 and 1974: lost in the transition to the welfare state.20 One of the first areas to be cleared was in fact not for a housing estate but for the 1951 Festival of Britain Exhibition and the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank. In the process, miscellaneous workshops, stables, wharves and houses were flattened, along with a Crosse & Blackwell factory and the famous Lion Brewery. At the same time, the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act recognised the need for the protection of historic buildings of special interest, establishing a national listing system that now consists of three grades: Grade I buildings, considered to be ‘of exceptional interest, sometimes considered to be internationally important’; Grade II*, ‘particularly important buildings of more than special interest’; and Grade II, simply those ‘of special interest’.
8 St Mary Aldermanbury, destroyed in the Blitz, 1940. 9 Holland House, Kensington, destroyed in the Blitz, 1940. As the economy recovered from wartime austerity, London and its industries began to modernise in another transition: to a post-industrial consumer economy. Changes in technology, taste and fashion unsentimentally condemned the unwanted buildings of declining enterprises and institutions: structures as diverse as cinemas, gasworks and churches; shop units that were too small; offices too low in ceiling height and with floor plans too cramped; hotels that lacked modern amenities.21 By the 1960s, a full-fledged ‘growth machine’ had become dominant, involving finance capital, the banking system, insurance companies, pension funds, property bonds, the taxation system and the planning system, as well as the property magnates themselves.22 Developers stretched the system to its limits:
borrowing short-term from the clearing banks for site acquisition and then taking out long-term mortgages from insurance companies. By squeezing planning permissions . . . out of often bemused planning committees and by taking full advantage of inflating office rents they could turn a derelict square of land into a goldmine in a matter of weeks.23
New office development replaced many of central London’s obsolescent commercial and institutional buildings as the property machine gathered momentum. Among the losses were the Mappin & Webb building at Bank Junction in the City (Chapter 15), the Junior Carlton Club, the rebuilt Haberdashers’ Hall, the rebuilt Clothworkers’ Hall, Kensington Town Hall (Chapter 16), Royal Doulton’s showrooms and offices on the Albert Embankment, and Lyons Corner House on the Strand (Chapter 19). The infamous Queen Anne’s Mansions in Westminster (Chapter 13) were replaced by a new Home Office building. The modernisation of the transport infrastructure led to further losses, including Heston Airport (Chapter 24), which, like London’s other prewar aerodromes, was much too small to cope with the growing volume of air traffic and the associated new generation of passenger aircraft. Road improvements accounted for multiple losses, notably the Coal Exchange and several Thameside warehouses, victims of the Upper and Lower Thames Street expressway that was built between Tower Hill and Westminster. Among the losses from railway modernisation projects was the Euston Arch, the Great Hall of the station and the Adelaide and Victoria hotels on either side of the Arch. Most of the remaining horse stables in the city, including those at Camden (Chapter 8) were meanwhile repurposed or demolished. Most recently, the new Elizabeth Line, added to the London rail network in 2022, required the demolition of the Astoria Theatre and Dance Salon (Chapter 20).
Corporate reorganisation resulted in many factory closures, pub closures and chain store closures, a significant proportion of which ended in demolitions. Among the prominent buildings lost to changing corporate strategy were the Firestone factory in Brentford (Chapter 22) and the Guinness brewery in Park Royal (Chapter 23). The reorganisation of the brewing industry, combined with the city’s changing social geography, also resulted in an ‘epidemic’ of pub closures, among them the White Horse, Poplar (Chapter 14). The legendary Ace of Spades roadhouse on the Kingston bypass (Chapter 21), already outmoded in context of postwar driving habits and entertainment preferences, was finally lost to an accidental fire. Other notable buildings were demolished simply because of functional obsolescence. Among these were the Imperial Institute, Kensington; Holloway Prison; the Metropolitan Board of Works building, Spring Gardens; the Army and Navy Club, Pall Mall (Chapter 9); St Luke’s Hospital, Old Street; and Columbia Market, Bethnal Green (Chapter 11). Montagu House, Whitehall, and Londonderry House, Park Lane, were added to the list of demolished town mansions of aristocratic families.
10 The Coal Exchange, Thames Street, demolished 1962. 11 Euston Arch, Marylebone, demolished 1962. 12 The Imperial Institute, Kensington, demolished 1967. In an echo of the late-Victorian response to ‘vanishing London’, the loss of familiar landmarks saw the publication of popular ‘Then and Now’ books and articles. A key difference, though, was that this time the conditions were right for the conservation movement to take root.24 The heady economic climate of the 1960s and early 1970s had induced several high-profile, large-scale redevelopment proposals from an alliance of developers and modernising planners, the immediate effect of which was to broaden and deepen the conservation movement by adding the voices of working- and lower-middle-class communities threatened by the ambitious proposals. One key target of dissent was a proposed Ringway road system that would have torn through many districts and displaced around 100,000 people. Another was the Greater London Council’s proposal for the comprehensive redevelopment of Covent Garden, involving a new road system through the area together with futuristic pedestrian walkways connecting office blocks, hotels, an international conference centre, schools and apartment blocks. Tensions between modernisation and conservation also scuppered a scheme for the wholesale demolition and redevelopment of the entire Whitehall complex between St James’s Park and the Thames Embankment. The groundswell of public support for conservation was underpinned by the advocacy of amenity groups, such as the Georgian Group that had been founded before the war in the wake of the loss of Adelphi Terrace. The Civic Trust was founded by Duncan Sandys in 1957 to raise awareness about the effects of town planning and redevelopment on the historic environment, and the Victorian Society came into being the following year under the leadership of John Betjeman and Nikolaus Pevsner, focused at first on the prospect of the demolition of the Coal Exchange and Euston Arch. SAVE Britain’s Heritage was founded in 1975 as a media lobbying group following the Victoria & Albert Museum’s provocative 1974 exhibition on ‘The Destruction of the Country House’; and the Thirties Society (now the Twentieth Century Society, ‘C20’) emerged from the cynical demolition of the Firestone factory.25
The political climate was soon reflected in legislation. In 1967, Duncan Sandys’ Civic Amenities Act introduced the concept of conservation areas to local authority planning strategies, providing for restrictions and constraints on alterations and demolitions throughout the designated area. The following year, another Town and Country Planning Act introduced a broad system of listed building consent. For the first time, the owners of listed buildings needed specific permission for any alteration or demolition that they wished to carry out, with an official presumption in favour of preservation. It became a criminal offence to carry out works to a listed building without consent, with imprisonment as an option in the most egregious cases.
By the 1980s, Britain’s historic built environment was widely recognised as an important contributor to international tourism as well as an increasingly important dimension of national identity. Accordingly, the National Heritage Act 1983 established the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England (now merged into Historic England). The commission’s primary responsibilities include the preservation of historic buildings, ancient monuments and conservation areas; advancing public understanding of England’s built heritage; and managing the National Heritage List for England. Overall, there developed a more general appreciation for the character and resonance of older buildings: a trend that was intensified as modernisation generated a ‘fast world’, in which the more places changed the more they seemed to look alike (with the same generic new supermarkets, petrol stations, shopping malls, industrial estates, office parks and suburban housing estates), the less they were able to retain a distinctive sense of place and the more people felt the need for the ordinary and the familiar in cityscapes,26 as well as for the symbolism and reassurance of London’s imperial, neo-colonial and institutional built heritage. The latter has been a recurrent target for terrorism, with Irish nationalism able to claim the doubtful distinction of having the longest history of terrorist bombing in London, dating back to a wave of Fenian bombings between 1867 and 1885. Between the 1970s and 1990s the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) targeted a number of prominent London landmarks in a bombing campaign that damaged many buildings, as well as completely destroying South Quay Plaza I and II and the Midland Bank building in the Docklands, the Baltic Exchange, St Mary Axe (Chapter 17), and St Ethelburga’s church, Bishopsgate.27
Yet another important transition – to a neoliberal political economy, beginning with the Thatcher administration (1979–90) – brought an assault on the welfare state and a weakening of both central and local government agencies with responsibility for the built environment. Amid an increasingly acute shortage of housing across the metropolis, and with local authorities having been stripped of their capacity to deliver social housing, there soon developed powerful ‘regeneration machines’ involving coalitions and partnerships among government, finance, property and construction interests, replacing brownfield sites with mixed-use developments including higher-density, socially mixed housing. Unprofitable or disused industrial sites and run-down social housing estates have provided the brownfield sites, while private capital has been invited to redevelop them. The result has been a spate of demolition of derelict and obsolescent industrial building and nearby housing on canal-side, riverside and dockside sites. Large-scale public–private regeneration schemes, where significant tracts of the built environment have been swept away, include Canary Wharf, Paddington Basin, Nine Elms, the South Bank, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, King’s Cross and London Bridge. Dozens of smaller schemes have targeted worn-out local authority housing estates, with central and local government subsidising demolition and site clearance, and private developers building an agreed number of new homes, including a specified number of ‘affordable’ homes, cross-subsidising them by constructing luxury apartments for sale or rent.28 The Greater London Authority has overseen the regeneration of more than sixty social housing estates, including the Aylesbury Estate, Walworth, the Heygate Estate, Southwark, the Ferrier Estate, Kidbrooke, Clapham Park Estate, Lambeth, and the South Acton Estate, Ealing. By 2017, the number of social housing units demolished across London was already approaching 40,000.29 For the most part, losses have involved the ‘everyday modernism’ of large-panel, system-built tower blocks and mid-rise flats, though some of the losses have been examples of architecturally acclaimed social housing, such as Burtonwood House, on the Woodberry Down Estate in Hackney (Chapter 25) and Robin Hood Gardens, in Poplar.
