1 Bucklersbury House and Temple Court, 3 Queen Victoria Street
Campbell Jones& Sons 1954–61
A few yards away from the Mansion House, the Bank of England and the Royal Exchange: a good place to start. This mass of building has a lot of storeys, a lot of windows, freedom from pointlessly applied period detail, freedom from obvious gracelessness, freedom from aesthetic megalomania. It has no virtues and no vices: it is the null point of architecture, the base line for the judgments in the rest of the book. This is where architecture begins.
2 English, Scottish and Australian Bank, 55 Gracechurch Street
Playne& Lacey and Partners 1958–60
Near the Monument; a decent, dignified, carefully furnished office building. Not outstanding, but perhaps worth a special visit to understand the difference between good design and cliché-mongering, which is exemplified in pre-war modernistic terms on its right, and in post-war terms (1962) on its left. The difference in the way that abstract mosaics are used in the two recent buildings is very telling. No. 55 has a pattern deftly fitted on to the roof of the recessed balcony on the eighth floor; the Midland Bank next door has a garish design sprayed high up all over the stairwell. Quality will always tell, whatever the style.
3 Malvern House and Zidpark, Upper Thames Street
C. E. Wilford& Son 1961
A wry little architectural parable here. The office block is ordinary, and the various touches intended to humanize it seem gauche and inorganic. But the Zidpark behind, because it was designed for cars and not humans, is an unaffected and straightforward job. Completely automatic, with the cars moved vertically on lifts and horizontally on rollers. The building is just an open-sided grid with bolted steel floors and vertical steel rods to stop you feeling nervous about the family saloon. No walls, no windows. The car-fronts make their own pattern. The unhappy and unnecessary fins attached to these rods were at the request of the planning authority who wanted it to have a ‘solid appearance’ at a distance. It used to look very well seen from Bankside, across the river. Now the view is hidden by a new building, but this has the best of reasons for being there, for it is the first new riverside pub in London since the war.
4 Rebuilding east of St. Paul’s
Various hands, 1954 onwards
If by whim or temperament you want to find somewhere to say: ‘Oh dear, the English!’ then this is it. Every change has been rung on timidity, compromise and incompetence. There is the grinding neo-Georgian horror of the Bank of London& South America, 40 Queen Victoria Street, EC4, one of the deadest buildings in the whole of London. There is the cautious equivocation of Gateway House, 1 Watling Street, EC4, next to it, which is not too bad, especially in the way it incorporates a
