II.
OUR RECENT GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS.
Sir William Harcourt once caused considerable irritation, especially amongst architects, by applying some words of Byron’s to New Scotland Yard and calling it the most recent, but the least decent, of our public buildings. Immediately a great number of architects began writing to the papers to say that Mr. Norman Shaw was a great man and by inference his Scotland Yard was a great building.
It certainly was, and is, in many ways, and yet I think Sir William Harcourt was quite justified. Scotland Yard departed from our national tradition in public buildings. Till then we had not taken as a prototype, even for a super-police station, a German Schloss or a French Château. Scotland Yard is that clever and impossible thing, a compromise between the two—a sort of reparations settlement with England left out. One is inclined, therefore, to call such a compromise indecent.
Now one assuredly does not want to stress too highly national character in architecture, but if it is to show anywhere it should be in the national buildings. In these since the Renaissance (and it is not much good going back earlier, though we did it to our cost in the Houses of Parliament) the established custom, amounting to a tradition, has been a Portland stone building in the palatial Palladian manner. Somerset House is the great example. It is thoroughly English, yet dignified without being dull or pretentious. Great columns are used sparingly, as accented syllables, to emphasise certain portions of the façades. It is obviously related by cousinship of design to a number of the larger private mansions throughout the country, but in a British Government office one must expect that. Looking at it from all sides, from the Embankment, Wellington Street, and the Strand, it is not only of sufficient height and mass to be impressive, without being overwhelming, but it has the right London scale. Its parts are neither too big, like Selfridge’s, nor too little, like the Savoy Hotel’s. No doubt when the water washed into its magnificent rusticated arches and it stood reflected in a clear Thames it must have been finer still. But there it is to-day, setting an unsurpassed standard to all the newer work. In the pearly beauty of its Portland stone it seems to be calmly rebuking both the provincial note of red brick in Scotland Yard and the domestic note, which the great red-tiled roof gives to that offspring of Scotland Yard on the opposite side of the river—the London County Hall.
If, then, with the memory of Somerset House in our minds, we walk down Whitehall we shall have a standard by which to judge the great new Government buildings. There are three of them, the upright rectangular block of the Woods and Forests building, the great colonnaded block of the War Office, with its two corner domed turrets, and the large Home Office block at the bottom on the right hand, which goes on endlessly with more and more towers and projections, as a palace should, down Great George Street. If we cannot quite retain the quality of Somerset House in our minds we can refer to another genuine antique, as we do in our furniture, for a standard—Inigo Jones’s Banqueting Hall. Any building which can live up to that in scale, repose and refinement, though it was the first of its type, will survive for all times.
At first you think the Woods and Forests building is rather good. It is big and bold and strong. It is well made, its composition is satisfactory, and it is weathering to a beautiful colour. But it has no distinction. It is better than Joe Beckett, but not as good as Carpentier. Its columns are the ordinary unfluted columns of commerce, while its entrance porch might be the entrance to a new Whitehall hotel—in Bloomsbury. However, one must not say too much against it or there will be no epithets left for the War Office.
The War Office is another of these buildings which at first glance is deceptive. A great Liberal peer once announced in reference to it, “There’s a model of what public building should be!” If he had made his money since the war, or because of it, I could have better understood him. I think what takes the public fancy in the War Office is its silhouette coming up and down Whitehall. It stands out very prominently at a break in the street. Its great range of independent columns in perspective is very effective. So are its two cupola-covered turrets at either end of the façade. Its composition is an obvious one, easy to grasp. It is such a good advertising front that Messrs. Robinson and Cleaver have made a caricature of it for their new premises in Regent Street. But when you have glanced at it from the top of a passing omnibus you have seen it all. It will not bear looking into. If the Woods and Forests building has no real distinction of manner the great pile of the War Office bears itself like some tired Titan. No consideration or feeling has been given to the detail. The same meaningless blocked columns appear endlessly to every window and door. Cast your mind back to Somerset House or look further down the road to the Banqueting Hall, or across it to the Horse Guards, and you see that another race built these things. It is sad, but it is true. Otherwise how is it that an eighteenth-century building is as seldom wrong as a modern one is right?
The one that is nearest right of our three great new offices is the last, and that it must be confessed is because it is nearest to the eighteenth century. Mr. Brydon, the architect, worked in Bath. Now in Bath you cannot escape the eighteenth century unless you are an extraordinary person like the designer of the Empire Hotel in that town. Mr. Brydon did not try. He absorbed as much of it as he could digest. Yet his big Home Office block is no mere “as you were” building. It is not an eighteenth-century copy, but it is sufficiently eighteenth century not to be vulgar. I will not say it is great architecture, like the Banqueting Hall, yet it has a certain amount of dignity and distinction. The great columns, for instance, have been fluted, but the delicacy of the fluting does not reappear in the rest of the building as it does in the old Treasury block close by. That is all of one piece and at a high level. Rarely do we achieve that nowadays, and certainly not in a great public building. When we do we have to go to an artist like the late E. A. Rickards or to Sir Edwin Lutyens, men whose personalities and taste are both sufficiently vivid and strong to fuse the diverse elements of modern work into a consistent whole.
If I were asked to name the best modern public building in London I should unhesitatingly say E. A. Rickards’s Town Hall at Deptford. But that is some way from Whitehall.