Lost London, page 29
The central issue here is that tastes and values are not universal, not top-down and not static. The disdain for Victorian buildings that dominated interwar and postwar discourse, for example, has been reversed with the passage of time. The Hoover factory in Perivale, described by Pevsner as ‘perhaps the most offensive of the modernistic atrocities along this road of typical by-pass factories’,8 is now listed at Grade II* by Historic England. The latest edition in the Pevsner series, edited and revised by Bridget Cherry, has had to retreat, simply noting the building’s ‘particularly striking combination of white glazing and green trim’.9 Raphael Samuel points to a nice example of how tastes and values gradually change among both the producers and consumers of the built environment. Brickwork, out of fashion and eclipsed by the concrete, steel and glass of postwar development, came back into fashion with the postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s, re-valuing some existing buildings (and intensifying some losses). Brick, Samuel writes, had previously been unfashionable, ‘in no way redeemed by its historicity, but rather condemned by it. It was associated . . . with prison-like factories and warehouses, dank walls and narrow passageways, back-to-back houses and “mean” by-law streets.’ But, ‘In the philosophy of conservation as it has crystallized in recent years, brickwork occupies the sacred space which Ruskin and the early Victorian Gothicists gave to stonework.’ By the late 1990s:
All over London early Victorian terraces and 1870s by-law streets, newly sandblasted, are gleaming with yellow stock bricks . . . ‘Exposed original brickwork’ is a feature of those warehouse conversions in which Grade II listed buildings are refurbished as studios, apartments or offices, while ‘herringbone’ or multicoloured brickwork serves as a kind of rustication for the new-build property rising alongside them . . . Infilling, too, follows the principles of invisible repair, with period frontages preserved intact even when there are more new houses than old. Home extension follows suit: in many conservancy areas it is a condition of council planning permission that additions and alterations should be faced with old stock bricks.10
We also have to bear in mind that the tastes and values of built-environment professionals can run counter to social values and lived experiences. A classic case in point is Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar, a social housing project demolished in two phases, between 2017–18 and 2024–5, to the vociferous protests of the design community and the Twentieth Century Society. Robin Hood Gardens was critically acclaimed but socially disastrous. Designed by Alison and Peter Smithson and completed in 1972, it was lauded by the design press for their concept of ‘streets in the sky’. The project was based on two linear high-rise blocks arranged fortress-like around an inner space that the Smithsons likened, with unabashed hyperbole, to central London’s Georgian squares. The space was filled with grassed-over mounds of rubble, to discourage noisy ball games. Elain Harwood, the leading academic expert on British Modernism, wrote of the ‘tremendous sculptural boldness’ of the project design and generously described the mounds left on the site as providing ‘a space equally suited to adventurous play or meditation’.11 But much to the surprise of the Smithsons and the architectural press, living in the project turned out to be a miserable experience. The project was expensive for the local authority, Tower Hamlets, to maintain and unsuited to the habits and preferences of its residents. An unsympathetic Alison Smithson seethed against ungrateful tenants who were unwilling to maintain ‘their rented bit of the socialist/democratic dream’.12 But Robin Hood Gardens was an idea posing as a solution, concrete boxes posing as homes, sculpture posing as architecture. Eventually, more than 75 per cent of the project’s residents supported its demolition when consulted by the local authority. The Twentieth Century Society launched a campaign to get the buildings formally listed and Building Design magazine, backed by such star architects as Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers, supported it. English Heritage declined, noting that Robin Hood Gardens had failed as a place for human beings to live.
101 Hoover Building, Perivale, in 2021. Beyond the preoccupations of architects, architectural historians and amenity societies there is, nevertheless, a broader appreciation of the historical built environment, including lost elements. This is based not only on the details of architectural distinction but also on the built environment as sites of memory, social history and community identity. The depth of this appreciation for the character, resonance and biographies of older buildings clearly owes something to the publicity surrounding conservation campaigns and controversies over lost buildings. But it has been driven more by structural socio-economic shifts. Economic and cultural globalisation has meant that place-based identity has been increasingly valued and exploited. London’s historic urban fabric has become a catalyst for property-led urban regeneration, while the legacies of its imperial, neo-colonial and institutional past have come to play an important role in London’s standing as a global tourist centre. The built environment is now part of a heritage industry that embraces places and settings that would formerly have been regarded as falling beneath the dignity of scholarly or specialist attention. London’s heritage industry has, for example, developed a remarkable proliferation of architectural and historical walks, with titles that include ‘David Bowie in 60s Soho’, ‘Historic Pubs’, ‘Jack the Ripper’, ‘London in the Swinging 60s’, ‘London’s Lost Music Venues’, ‘Lost City [of London]’, ‘Lost London’, ‘Lost London Churches’, ‘Old Mayfair and Old Westminster’.
102 Robin Hood Gardens, Poplar, demolished 2017–25. More than 19,000 buildings in Greater London are protected through listing, though Historic England’s Heritage At Risk Register for 2024 listed more than a thousand buildings, sites and structures in Greater London that are at risk of neglect, decay or inappropriate change – including Brookwood cemetery and the pedestrian subway leading from the High Level railway station to the site of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham. Greater London’s 1,028 statutory conservation areas, meanwhile, account for about 17 per cent of the built fabric of the metropolis, though in some boroughs the percentage is much higher: about 70 per cent of Kensington and Chelsea and 50 per cent of Islington, for example. The impact has been felt well beyond the heritage industry and the concerns of amenity societies. ‘Refurbishment’, a category unknown to the trade directories of the 1950s, is now a major sector of the building industry, with a trade journal to itself. The social geography of the metropolis has been recast as relatively affluent households gravitate towards the ‘authenticity’ and ‘character’ of housing and converted industrial and commercial buildings in and around conservation areas.
Meanwhile, half or more of the existing fabric of the metropolis remains open to the inevitability – and necessity – of creative destruction. The biographies of the twenty-five buildings described in this book underscore this relentless restlessness of London’s urban development, each revealing something of the city’s history. The stories of these individual buildings are expressions of many different aspects of London’s rich and complex history. We have seen, for example, how the Pantheon embodied the beau monde of Georgian London, how Millbank Penitentiary was a response to demands for a greater degree of social control amid the rapid and unsettling industrialisation and urbanisation of London, how Camden Stables, the Ace of Spades roadhouse and Heston Airport were manifestations of the ways in which London responded to the transition to the internal combustion engine; and so on. Every building, lost or not, reflects something of the prevailing political economy, the technologies and the cultural trends at the point of its creation; and every building becomes a living history, its own biography woven into – and illustrative of – the broader history of the metropolis itself, simultaneously an outcome and shaper of social, political, cultural and economic forces. Equally, the circumstances of their eventual destruction underscore the inevitability of accidents, the capacity for human hostility, the impassive logic of capital and the relentless metamorphosis of urbanisation.
Notes
INTRODUCTION
1. Bevan, R., The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. London: Reaktion Books, 2nd edn, 2016, p. 7.
2. Andersen, R. and K. Negendahl, ‘Lifespan prediction of existing building typologies’, Journal of Building Engineering, 65, 2023, pp. 1–14.
3. Keene, D., ‘Growth, modernisation and control: The transformation of London’s landscape, c.1500–c.1760’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 107, 2001, p. 25.
4. Miele, C., ‘The first conservation militants: William Morris and the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings’, in M. Hunter (ed.), Preserving the Past: The Rise of Heritage in Modern Britain. London: Alan Sutton, 1996, pp. 17–37.
5. Zemgulys, A., ‘Building the vanished city: Conservationism in turn-of-the-century London’, Nineteenth Century Prose, 26, 1, 1999, p. 46.
6. Yelling, J.A., ‘LCC slum clearance policies, 1889–1907’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 7, 3, 1982, pp. 292–303.
7. Yelling, J.A., ‘The selection of sites for slum clearance in London, 1875–1888’, Journal of Historical Geography, 7, 2, 1981, pp. 155–165.
8. Dyos, H.J., ‘Some social costs of railway building in London’ and ‘Railways and housing in Victorian London’, Journal of Transport History, 2, 2, 1955, pp. 23–30 and 90–100.
9. Zemgulys, A., ‘Building the vanished city: Conservationism in turn-of-the-century London’, p. 39.
10. Davies, P., Lost London 1870–1945. Croxley Green: Transatlantic Press for English Heritage, 2009, p. 22.
11. Knox, P., Better by Design? Architecture, Urban Planning, and the Good City. Blacksburg, VA: Virginia Tech Publishing, 2020. Open source, https://publishing.vt.edu/site/books/m/10.21061/better-by-design/ (accessed 8 June 2025).
12. Knox, P., Metroburbia: The Anatomy of Greater London. London: Merrell, 2017.
13. Powell, C., The British Building Industry since 1800: An Economic History. London: Spon Press, 1980.
14. Davies, Lost London 1870–1945, p. 28.
15. Hobhouse, H., Lost London. New York: Weathervane Books, 1971.
16. Harris, J., Moving Rooms: The Trade in Architectural Salvages. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2007.
17. Conen, J., The Bombing of London 1940–41. Market Harborough: Matador, 2023.
18. Atkinson, T. and B. Atkinson (eds), Missing Buildings. London: Hwæt Books, 2015.
19. Beech, N., ‘Demolition figures: The appearance and expression of the topman and mattockman in LCC contracts, 1941–1951’, Architecture Research Quarterly, 16, 3, 2012, pp. 245–252.
20. Yelling, J., ‘The incidence of slum clearance in England and Wales, 1955–85’, Urban History, 27, 2, 2000, pp. 234–254.
21. Powell, The British Building Industry since 1800.
22. Ambrose, P.J. and R.J. Colenutt, The Property Machine. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975; P. Scott, The Property Masters. London: E. & F.N. Spon, 1996.
23. Jenkins, S., Landlords to London: The Story of a Capital and Its Growth. London: Book Club Associates, 1975, p. 216.
24. Davis, J., ‘The conservation consensus’, in Waterloo Sunset: London from the Sixties to Thatcher. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022, pp. 183–216.
25. Stamp, G., ‘The art of keeping one jump ahead: Conservation societies in the twentieth century’, in Hunter (ed.), Preserving the Past, pp. 77–98.
26. Knox, P., ‘Creating ordinary places: Slow cities in a fast world’, Journal of Urban Design, 10, 1, 2005, pp. 1–11.
27. Legg, G., ‘“The buildings are screaming”: The spatial politics of terrorism in London’, London Journal, 45, 1, 2020, pp. 1–16.
28. Knox, P., ‘Reflexive neoliberalism, urban design, and regeneration machines’, in H. Westlund and T. Haas (eds), The Post-Urban World. London: Routledge, 2017, pp. 82–96.
29. Watt, P., Estate Regeneration and Its Discontents: Public Housing, Place and Inequality in London. Bristol: Policy Press, 2021.
1 CHRIST CHURCH, GREYFRIARS
1. Kingsford, C.L., ‘History of Greyfriars: The site and buildings’, in The Grey Friars of London, Aberdeen, 1915, pp. 27–52. British History Online, www.british-history.ac.uk/brit-franciscan-soc/vol6/pp27-52 (accessed 8 June 2025).
2. Kingsford, ‘History of Greyfriars’, p. 33.
3. Holder, N., The Friaries of Medieval London. London: Boydell Press, 2017, p. 76.
4. Daniell, A.E., London City Churches. New York: Scribner’s, 1896, p. 151.
5. Holder, The Friaries of Medieval London, p. 311.
6. The City of London Corporation (‘the City’) is the historic core of Roman and medieval London, covering roughly 1 square mile on the north bank of the Thames between Chancery Lane in the west and Middlesex Street in the east. It is considered the world’s oldest continuous municipal government, with its first recorded royal charter dating from around 1067, granted by William the Conqueror to confirm the rights and privileges previously enjoyed by Londoners under Edward the Confessor.
7. Davis, E.J., ‘The parish churches of the City of London’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 83, 4316, 1935, pp. 895–915.
8. Jefferey, P., The City Churches of Sir Christopher Wren. London: Hambledon Press, 1996.
9. Davis, ‘The parish churches of the City of London’, p. 908.
10. Weinstein, B., ‘Heritage, civilization and oblivion in interwar Britain: The case of the City churches’, Cultural and Social History, 19, 1, 2022, pp. 39–55.
11. Weinstein, ‘Heritage, civilization and oblivion in interwar Britain’, p. 48.
12. Quoted in Weinstein, ‘Heritage, civilization and oblivion in interwar Britain’, p. 47.
13. The Sphere, Saturday, 4 January 1941, p. 3.
14. Morton, H.V., In Search of London. London: Methuen, 1951, pp. 38–39.
15. Bishop’s Commission on City Churches, The City Churches: Final Report of the Bishop of London’s Commission. London: Press and Publications Board of the Church Assembly, 1946.
16. Larkham, P.J. and J.L. Nasr, ‘Decision-making under duress: The treatment of churches in the City of London during and after World War II’, Urban History, 39, 2012, pp. 285–309.
17. Bombed Churches as War Memorials. Cheam: Architectural Press, 1945.
18. The Times, 15 August 1944.
19. Pohlad, M.B., ‘The appreciation of ruins in Blitz-era London’, London Journal, 30, 2, 2005, p. 14.
20. Pope-Hennessy, J., History under Fire: 52 Photographs of Air Raid Damage to London Buildings, 1940–41 by Cecil Beaton. London: Batsford, 1941.
21. Quoted in Matheson, N., ‘National identity and the “melancholy of ruins”: Cecil Beaton’s photographs of the London Blitz’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 1, 3, 2008, pp. 261–274.
22. Richards, J.M., The Bombed Buildings of Britain: A Record of Architectural Casualties 1940–41. London: Architectural Press, 1942.
23. Richards, J.M., Memoirs of an Unjust Fella. London: Faber & Faber, 1980, p. 2.
24. Bradley, S. and N. Pevsner, The Buildings of England. London 1: The City of London. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2002, p. 188.
25. Richards, The Bombed Buildings of Britain, p. 26.
26. ‘House hunting in London: A 17th-century church tower with updates’, www.nytimes.com/2021/07/21/realestate/london-house-hunting.html (accessed 8 June 2025).
2 OLD ST THOMAS’S HOSPITAL
1. Hadcock, R.N. and D. Knowles, Medieval Religious Houses, England and Wales. London: Longmans Green, 1953.
2. Carlin, M., ‘The medieval hospital of St Thomas the Martyr in Southwark’, Bulletin of the Society for the Social History of Medicine, 37, 1985, pp. 19–23.
3. Rawcliffe, C., ‘The hospitals of later medieval London’, Medical History, 28, 1984, pp. 1–21.
4. Rawcliffe, ‘The hospitals’, p. 21; see also W.B. Robison, ‘The bawdy master of St Thomas’s Hospital’, Historical Research, 83, 221, 2010, pp. 565–574.
5. Denny, L., ‘The royal hospitals of the City of London’, Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons, 52, 1973, p. 87.
6. Griffin, J.P., ‘London’s medieval hospitals and the Reformation’, Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of London, 32, 1, 1998, pp. 72–76.
7. Golding, B., Historical Account of the Origin and Progress of St Thomas’s Hospital, Southwark. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, & Brown, 1835.
8. Golding, Historical Account of the Origin and Progress of St Thomas’s Hospital, pp. 118–119.
