Today’s appeal by English Heritage for our help with finding commemorative blue plaques lost to war, redevelopment or planning is also a useful reminder that urban change is most often felt at the level of a single building. Even those impacts that fall short of complete loss – giving it a new address, altering its look or access arrangements, or shifting its orientation completely – have a significant effect on users and passers-by.
Addresses carry connotations beyond their practical function. ‘Number One’ in a given street has been prestigious since at least the time of the Duke of Wellington, whose home of Apsley House became known as Number One London. No. 1 Cornhill in the heart of the City of London has had its coveted postal address for over a century, whereas the far more recent One Hyde Park a few miles west is a confection of that development’s marketing team. Sometimes wit is involved in numbering a building; starting in the late eighties law firm Clifford Chance spent fifteen years at the then new 200 Aldersgate Street – conveniently, ‘200’ in Roman numerals is CC. A change of address is de rigueur with contemporary redevelopment schemes, allowing disassociation from a previous usage or tenant or the past more generally. Fortunately large buildings cover more than one nominal house number even if most of those have never been used (numbering is the responsibility of the local authority rather than the Post Office, though naturally that body retains an interest), providing a useful pool from which to choose. Corner plots have traditionally taken their address from either street, as seen at the ends of Georgian terraces around Bloomsbury and Westminster. This often means such houses are described by a location other than where their front door can be found.
Back in the Square Mile 7 Lothbury has an undistinguished address but stunning architecture, with its Moorish arches and Venetian Gothic windows; in fact the two are inter-related since, remarkably, the elaborate doorway was actually moved forty years after the building was completed to Lothbury from the longer but less visible Tokenhouse Yard frontage, which was then seamlessly remade. And if that alteration of orientation was confusing for Edwardian City gents who knew the original building, spare a thought for their Carolean contemporaries trying to find 55 Moorgate after some time away; the building previously known by that address is now 77 Coleman Street, having had its front and back swapped and its entrance moved accordingly. Thankfully a new alleyway to one side creates a short cut between old and new.
Re-facing a building in a different material to the one originally used has long been employed by country house owners as a quick(ish) and cheap(er) way of keeping up with the latest architectural fashion. Witley Court in Worcestershire began life as a Jacobean house of brick but was encased in cut stone two hundred years later to seem up to date, whilst as recently as 1991 the Duke of Westminster had the strikingly Modernist Eaton Hall reclad in French Renaissance style only twenty years after it was built. In London, Buckingham Palace underwent the same treatment at the turn of the 20th century. At a smaller scale in the capital a livery company’s own home near Tower Bridge (Bakers Hall) and a commercial office block on Southwark Bridge (Rose Court) employed the same approach, and the sustainability agenda is now driving more subtle variations on this theme at, for example, Panorama St Paul’s.
Rather more radically, the elegant Lansdowne House in Mayfair by the great 18th century architect Robert Adam – previous occupiers include William Waldorf Astor and Harry Gordon Selfridge – was brutally truncated between the world wars for construction of a new road planned to run through the plot of the house. After removing its principal elevation, all the rooms were dismantled to a depth of forty feet before the former was reconstructed in modified form to front what remained (which painstaking work might, remarkably enough, still satisfy EH’s blue plaque selection criterion that ‘The building must survive in a form that the commemorated person would have recognised’). The work arose from the house becoming a club.
Away from these dramatic interventions small details like a freeholder’s mark, the carved names of the architect or builder, descriptions of historic events on the site and fragments preserved from its earlier structures – the so-called London Stone in Cannon Street, pictured at the topof this post, is now embedded within its third building in less than a hundred years – stand as more reassuring links with the past, as do those plaques. In a world of complex and occasionally disorientating events, not least those that occurred twenty three years ago today, let’s hope they find a few of them.
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