by Tom Quinn
Built from dark-red bricks and almost always covered in ivy, the building has a fortress feel about it – there is no decorative brickwork and not a ground-floor window in sight.
The building was made to protect the admiralty communications centre from bombs during the Second World War and almost nothing about it appears in any guide book about London.
When it was first put up the press was forbidden to mention it and everything possible was done to make sure it was undetectable, particularly from the air, and impregnable. The walls are incredibly thick and there is no doubt that it would withstand a conventional bomb or two, but just to be on the safe side the military decided that the best way to hide the building from the air would be to plant grass on top of it.
However, this led to one extremely eccentric proceeding which continues to this day – every morning in summer an employee carrying his top-secret pass presents himself to the officials within the building and is allowed to enter. He carries with him a lawn mower – this has to be carried out through an upstairs window onto a set of steps that lead to the roof. He mows the grass, carries his mower back downstairs across the office floor and out of the building.
HOW ST PAUL’S HAD A MIRACULOUS ESCAPE
1940
The Blitz on London – the word is from the German Blitzkrieg meaning lightning war – destroyed almost as much of the beautiful ancient City as the planners and developers of the 1950s and 1960s.
Despite its great size and the fact that, from the air, St Paul’s Cathedral was an easy target, London’s greatest church was not destroyed during the Blitz – in fact it was scarcely touched at all, despite the rain of bombs that fell in the area month after month. The fact of St Paul’s survival is well known, but it is only when we look in detail at the number and size of bombs that fell that we realise quite what a miraculous escape the church had.
The bombing began in September 1940. Before that date Hitler had concentrated his attacks on British RAF fields and more obviously military targets, but the indiscriminate bombing of London that began in September showed that Hitler would stop at nothing to win the war. His actions over London and later Coventry were to lead ultimately to the fire bombing of Dresden and other horrors.
For 57 nights London was bombed every night and frequently also during the day. Between September 1940 and May 1941 almost nineteen thousand tonnes of high explosive rained down on the capital. Largely residential areas such as Southwark and Holborn were very badly damaged.
Through the early weeks of the Blitz the historic area of smaller houses and offices that were in many cases just yards from St Paul’s in a warren of tiny ancient streets were completely flattened by direct hits. The whole of the historic booksellers area of Paternoster Row vanished forever, but right in the midst of this firestorm St Paul’s remained unscathed for reasons that really cannot be adequately explained – expert fire watching certainly helped and the cathedral was also just very lucky. Disaster came very close indeed when on 12 September a bomb fell right next to the southwest tower but failed to explode. It buried itself deep underground and hard up against the church foundations – only the skill and bravery of the firefighters who spent three days extricating the bomb prevented disaster. When the bomb was finally removed it was still live. It was placed on the back of a truck and carried at a snail’s pace to Hackney Marshes where it was detonated – the resulting crater measured more than one hundred feet across.
SAVED BY A BATHTUB
1941
During the savage, relentless bombing of London in 1941 there were numerous tales of extraordinary escapes from what really should have been certain death – in one case a man was blown out of the upstairs bedroom of a house into a bush in his garden. He emerged entirely unscathed despite the fact that his house had been completely demolished. In at least one case a man was found unharmed still in his sitting room, still in an armchair but with the whole house demolished around him.
Perhaps the most extraordinary example of survival against all the odds during the Blitz was the nineteen-year-old woman – later described by her rescuers as extremely attractive – who was taking a bath when a huge bomb scored a direct hit on her house in Poplar.
The explosion blew the house to pieces but somehow in the moment of destruction the young woman’s bath was turned over on top of her, and as the rubble crashed down she was protected completely by the cast iron. It took several hours to dig her out but she emerged completely unscathed – though naked and highly embarrassed!
LONDON BRIDGE GOES TO WAR
1944
When Charles Rennie’s Waterloo Bridge – completed in 1817 and named to commemorate Wellington’s great victory – was destroyed by a stupid decision made by the London planning authorities, London lost what was generally agreed to be one of the most beautiful structures in Europe.
The ghastly modern bridge that replaced it has nothing to recommend it other than the fact that it is part of a bizarre and little-known story.
London’s bridges generally were so busy by the mid-1930s – a direct result of a vast increase in car ownership – that the decision was taken to rebuild Waterloo Bridge, but while it was being rebuilt a way had to be found to keep the Waterloo crossing open, so a temporary metal bridge was built alongside the old one.
Finally the new (and very ugly) bridge was opened and the metal bridge taken down, but rather than destroy this useful temporary structure it was carefully packed away and stored for future use.
By now the war was on and by the time the Allies invaded Germany in 1944 only one bridge remained over the Rhine. When that was destroyed the old metal Waterloo Bridge was put on a train and taken to the Rhine where it was quickly put together and thrown out across the river. It became an absolutely vital part of the war effort. When hostilities came to an end it vanished without trace – just a small part of the vast pile of twisted metal strewn across Europe.
A CURIOUS CORRESPONDENCE
1949
Charing Cross Road has been famous for its second-hand and antiquarian booksellers for more than a century and it was in a small, now vanished shop here that a fascinating and bizarre relationship developed between a customer of the bookshop and one of the staff.
The story – published in 1970 – was eventually to be made into a film. It captured the imagination of the public because it seemed so ordinary and yet somehow romantic and even, ultimately, tragic.
It all began in 1949 when New York writer Helen Hanff (1920–1979) decided to order a number of rather obscure books of English literature from the London bookseller Marks & Company. She wrote to the bookseller at 84 Charing Cross Road and received a helpful reply from Frank Doel, an employee who was able to send her the books she needed. She replied and became a regular customer, but as the books were ordered, wrapped and dispatched something else was developing. The brief letters ordering various volumes began to take on a new character and soon Doel and Hanff were exchanging letters filled with jokes, news and gossip. She wrote mostly to Doel but also to other members of staff and when she heard that post-war austerity meant shortages of a number of basic food items she even sent the bookshop staff food parcels.
By the mid-1950s Doel and Hanff were on intimate terms yet they had never met. They exchanged birthday presents and Christmas gifts and wrote extensively to each other about their interests in everything from the poetry of John Donne to the best recipe for Yorkshire pudding.
The correspondence lasted almost twenty years. On several occasions Hannf planned to visit London but somehow it never happened and in 1968 Hannf’s regular letters from London ceased. Doel had died.
Hanff visited England at last in the early 1970s but with Doel’s death Marks & Company had closed and the shop that Hanff visited stood empty and bare. She was able to look through the window but the rich life she had enjoyed through her correspondence had died with the man who inspired it.
The touching and curious story was immortalised in Hanff’s book 84
Charing Cross Road (1970) and in the later volume The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street (1973) that recorded her sad visit to the empty shop.
In 1987 the story was made into a successful film.
WHY THE AMERICANS DON’T OWN THEIR EMBASSY
1950
Despite London’s apparent pride in its built heritage, early buildings are still demolished to make way for the bland and the mediocre. Most recently the Mappin and Webb site – a group of attractive Victorian City buildings from the nineteenth century – was destroyed to make way for yet more bland office buildings; in the 1970s and 1980s Georgian and earlier houses in central London were frequently pulled down for no good reason. But even while the authorities were allowing the destruction to go ahead they were extolling the virtues to tourists of London’s historic architecture – the very architecture they were allowing to be demolished at every opportunity.
But it was far worse in the past. In the 1920s all of John Nash’s magnificent Regent Street was demolished; in the 1870s the last great Jacobean mansion in central London – Northumberland House – was destroyed to build, of all things, a cut-through road.
In the 1930s Norfolk House, an exquisite building in St James’s Square, was knocked down to build something of absolutely no merit whatsoever. The list goes on almost indefinitely.
Grosvenor Square, between Piccadilly and Oxford Street, suffered particularly badly from this mania for destruction. By the 1940s most of the original houses in the square – many relatively unaltered since the late seventeenth century – had gone to be replaced by flats and shops.
Then in the late 1950s the Duke of Westminster agreed to allow the Americans to demolish the whole of the west side of the square so they could put up the terrible building we see today; but the siting of the American Embassy led to one of the most bizarre and protracted processes of negotiation ever seen in London.
The Americans have embassies all over the world and in every single case they buy the land first and then build their embassy. They assumed that this would be possible in England so they asked the Duke of Westminster – who owned Grosvenor Square – how much they would have to pay to buy the freehold of the land. What they didn’t know is that the Grosvenor family never sell. Their vast wealth is based precisely on this simple fact: they own three hundred acres of central London including most of Belgravia and Mayfair, not to mention land holdings all over the world. All the houses and offices on this land are leased; their freeholds are never sold.
When the Americans were told they could not buy their land they insisted that was unacceptable and that they would petition Parliament to force the Duke to sell. Questions were asked in Parliament; the Grosvenor family were heavily leaned on but all to no avail.
Then the Duke thought of a good compromise. He told the furious Americans that if they were prepared to return to the Grosvenor family all those lands in the United States stolen after the American War of Independence then he would allow the Americans to buy their site on the west side of Grosvenor Square. The Americans knew when they were beaten (they would have had to give the Duke most of Maine and New York!) and being unwilling to hand over land they themselves had stolen from the Indians anyway, they backed down and the Duke of Westminster allowed them a 999-year lease. And that explains why the embassy in London is the only American embassy built on land not owned by the United States.
A PIGEON SHOOTER IN FLEET STREET
1950
It’s easy to forget that Fleet Street was once not just the home of Britain’s national newspapers but also of a substantial part of its book-publishing effort. And the most obscure magazines had their offices either in the main thoroughfare or in one of the numerous courts and alleys that run north and south of Fleet Street.
After the Second World War Shooting Times magazine, an eccentric weekly beloved of old colonels who liked to read how many pheasants or grouse had been shot in a particular week, was still being published from a tiny upstairs office in Fleet Street, an office it had started life in more than fifty years earlier. At that time, and for many years afterwards, the magazine was staffed almost entirely by dull-witted public schoolboys who had almost no knowledge of journalism but were absolute experts at all matters to do with hunting, shooting and fishing.
They were also terrific drinkers and practical jokers.
One editor – who stayed in the editor’s chair for nearly thirty years – was cautioned by the police on several occasions for playing practical jokes on passers-by that could have had serious consequences.
He regularly took pot shots at pigeon out of the window or slipped out at lunchtime when the street was crowded and left his bowler hat on the ground with a live pigeon trapped underneath it just to see the fright it would give the first person who picked the hat up.
Another favourite trick was to drop nets from the first floor window on to unsuspecting passers-by, but long before the newspapers all moved away small magazines like Shooting Times found they could no longer afford high London rents and they moved away, leaving Fleet Street a quieter but perhaps less interesting place.
WINE CELLAR SURVIVES THE CENTURIES
1952
It is difficult now to visualise Whitehall and the Palace of Westminster as they were before the building of Parliament Square and the present House of Lords and Commons.
All along the river here was once a warren of royal buildings stretching from the Thames to Westminster Abbey and up Whitehall to the Banqueting Hall.
But the Palace of Westminster was never a palace in the modern sense of one great building – it was a mass of small ramshackle buildings dating back to the time of William the Conqueror.
Henry VIII got so fed up with its shabby appearance that when Cardinal Wolsey (1473–1530) fell from grace he appropriated the Cardinal’s huge house further up Whitehall and changed its name from York Place to Whitehall Palace.
Many of the old royal buildings along Whitehall had been demolished by the time a huge fire destroyed almost everything in 1834, but the Banqueting Hall (1610) survived as did the Jewel Tower and what is now known as Henry VIII’s wine cellar.
The cellars are in fact an astonishing survival – they are the only remaining part of Wolsey’s old palace and were probably built as early as the end of the fifteenth century. What makes the vault’s survival even more extraordinary and exciting, however, is the fact that when Whitehall was being rebuilt in the 1950s the vaults were spared the demolition normally suffered by anything old that got in the way of modern redevelopment. Instead the vaulted undercroft supported by four massive octagonal pillars and weighing more than 800 tons was carefully lowered eighteen feet to preserve it beneath the foundations of the modern office building.
Not a brick or stone was damaged during this remarkable operation. The move cost more than £100,000, which would equate to tens of millions of pounds in today’s terms.
A GIFT TO LONDON – A GERMAN LAMPPOST!
1963
The practice of town twinning is bizarre – for many it simply provides an excuse for local officials to enjoy all-expenses-paid trips to foreign countries; for those who enjoy such trips, twinning represents (perhaps) a hand of friendship extended across the seas to nations with whom we are already friendly.
Perhaps the odd, slightly dubious, nature of twinning explains one of the strangest gifts ever given by one nation to another.
Anyone who walks along the north side of the Thames above Hammersmith Bridge will see the old inns and boathouses that have characterised the area for centuries, but tucked away against the wall of an old house the eagle-eyed may spot something very different – a worn rectangular metal plaque. The plaque records that in 1963 Herr Willy Brandt (1913–1992), later the German Chancellor, gave the good citizens of Hammersmith a lamppost. The gift was to mark the twinning of Hammersmith with the borough of Neukollen in Berlin.
The plaque solemnly declares that ‘The lamp above this plaque was formerly used to light a street in West Berlin. I
t was presented by Herr Willy Brandt, the Mayor of West Berlin, to councillor Stanley Atkins as a token of friendship.’
Whether the lamp has some symbolic significance – perhaps to shed light on the relationship or to illuminate the dark past of European history is anyone’s guess. One wonders what Hammersmith gave West Berlin – perhaps a manhole cover or a stretch of municipal railing!
CAMPAIGNING AGAINST PEANUTS AND SITTING
1965
Strange stories and strange characters are not entirely a feature of London’s more distant past. Anyone over fifty who knows London well will remember a very odd character who haunted Oxford Street and Regent Street for several decades.
Stanley Green died at the age of seventy-eight in 1992, having spent nearly thirty years parading the West End carrying a placard warning mostly against the dangers of protein.
Over the years he sold tens of thousands of hand-printed leaflets (at 12p each) explaining why lustful feelings were induced by ‘fish, birds, meat, cheese, egg, peas, beans, nuts and sitting’. He had worked for many years in a perfectly ordinary job in the civil service before starting his one-man campaign against lust and peanut eating in the early 1960s.
No one really knows why he decided that protein was the root of all the world’s evils but once he’d made his decision he never gave up.
‘Protein makes passion,’ he would say to anyone who would listen. ‘If we eat less of it, the world will be a happier place.’
He produced his leaflets on a small press in his tiny flat in north west London; the tenants below often complained about the terrific sounds of thumping and crashing on print day. Until he qualified for a free bus pass he would cycle each day to Oxford Street in his raincoat, cap and wire-rimmed spectacles, and always recalled with pleasure that motorists reading the board on the back of his bicycle would toot their horns and wave. ‘I’ve known coaches pass,’ he said, ‘and everyone has stood up and cheered me.’
