London's 100 Most Extraordinary Buildings E-Book

David Long

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 268

Beschreibung

Delve into London's architectural curiositites and discover the unexpected gems waiting around every corner. London is full of extraordinary, enigmatic and, above all, unexpected buildings: a pirate castle in Camden, an art gallery made of shipping containers, underground ghost stations, and much more. Here David Long reveals the very best of the capital's extraordinary buildings, some of which are passed by every day, hidden in plain sight.

Leseprobe

First published 2018

This paperback edition published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© David Long, 2018, 2023

All illustrations © Melissa Turland, 2018, 2023

The right of David Long to be identified as the Authorof this work has been asserted in accordance with theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 75248 030 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

Map of London

Central London – West

Central London – East

North London

North-west London

West London

South-west London

South-east London

East London

Six That Never Were

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

An account of whatever is most remarkable for grandeur, elegance, curiosity or use.

London and its Environs Described, by R. and J. Dodsley

(1761)

The lack of an urban masterplan – although John Evelyn, among others, sought to interest Charles II in one within a few days of the Great Fire – means that in London (in contrast to, say, central Paris, Babylon or even Nazi Berlin) the chief glory lies not in the theatrical effect of triumphant avenues aligned along carefully drafted axes, or meticulously planned grids of street and square, but rather in its many historic and often highly individual buildings.

A few of the strangest and grandest are open to the public, if you know who to ask. But many still remain strictly off-limits, heightening the mystery and sense of secrecy which surround them. Others are buildings people walk by every day, yet these have become so familiar that few stop to consider how curious they are.

Just yards from the Royal Albert Hall, for example, a 300ft tower attracts barely a glance (many locals don’t even know it’s there). The capital’s narrowest building, in Trafalgar Square, is a tiny one-man police station, while its widest – at almost 1,000ft – has been favourably compared to the Winter Palace at St Petersburg.

Others hide behind formal façades, like the tranquil oases of the traditional gentlemen’s clubs, for example, whose leafy courtyards and lofty interiors can only be glimpsed through elegant Georgian windows. Or London’s great private palaces, those few remaining aristocratic townhouses which still dominate their immediate surroundings.

Still others simply defy any kind of categorisation whatsoever. Transforming the City skyline, the Swiss Re Building, or Gherkin, has rapidly become as recognisable as Tower Bridge or the old red Routemaster bus. To the south-west, an Arab tent houses the remains of Sir Richard Burton, Victorian explorer and translator of The Arabian Nights. And more recently, in Neasden, 2,000 volunteers joined forces to create a vast Hindu temple, which opened in 1995, using thousands of tons of Italian marble, Bulgarian limestone and English oak.

A privately owned tunnel under the Thames (the entrance to which is next to the Tower of London); tube stations nobody’s heard of, even though their ticket halls can still be seen at street level; and the incredible complex of more than 6 acres of top secret offices excavated under Whitehall prior to the Second World War – London may be the most visited city on Earth, but it still has the power to surprise.

David Long

www.davidlong.info

EISENHOWER’SWARTIME BUNKER

NORTH CRESCENT, CHENIES STREET, WC1

On some Georgian brickwork in Lord North Street, just off Smith Square in Westminster, one can still discern a painted sign giving directions to a nearby air-raid shelter. It’s a nice reminder of grimmer times, an authentic bit of Dad’s Army if you like, but once you start looking around central London for curious bits of Second World War memorabilia, such things pop up everywhere.

By far the most obvious are what remains of HM Government’s network of deep-level shelters, not just because the excavations are so vast but also because the above-ground parts are so monolithic, so stark and ugly, and just so plain odd that it’s a mystery why more passers-by don’t notice them or wonder what they are. Ten were planned and eight built, one underneath Chancery Lane tube station, the rest beneath seven Northern Line stations, each comprising a pair of parallel tunnels an incredible 1,200ft in length with the accommodation spread over two levels. Work on numbers nine and ten was begun but then halted, the first because it was thought to be threatening the fabric of St Paul’s and the second, at Kennington Oval, because its proximity to the River Effra made it liable to flood.

Of the eight, four – at Camden, Clapham North and South, and Belsize Park – were intended for civilian use during air-raids and, equipped with latrines, first aid posts and so on, could each accommodate up to 8,000 people. The others, however, were secret citadels for government use: Stockwell providing emergency accommodation for the US military; those at Clapham Common and Chancery Lane set aside for the civil authorities in the event of an attack by V1 or V2 rockets; and the one beneath Goodge Street (opposite) fitted out as General Eisenhower’s West End headquarters.

This last one is historically therefore the most interesting; the future US president in his role as Supreme Allied Commander used it as his main command and control centre for all D-Day communications. Indeed, this one even enjoyed the benefit of a direct link to Churchill’s famous Cabinet War Rooms, using a Lamson pneumatic tube of the sort one routinely saw employed in department stores until the 1970s.

Plans were drawn up after the war to link them together into a new high-speed tube line, but sadly nothing came of this. Instead Chancery Lane was incorporated into the giant Kingsway telephone exchange, 100ft beneath street level, while the remainder were eventually offered to commercial organisations for use as secure, archival storage. (Interestingly, the lease agreements allow for these to be rapidly reoccupied by the authorities should the need arise; in the meantime the Goodge Street one has been used by Channel 4 to store copies of its programmes.)

Today, spotting where the others are is easy enough, for several of the giant, circular, almost gasometer-like blockhouses which formed the entrances are visible from the A3 as it runs through south London to Clapham. The best is in Chenies Street, however, between Tottenham Court Road and Gower Street, where a pair of linked concrete blockhouses – one like a circular pillbox, the other a slightly taller octagon – tower over a war memorial and completely dominate North Crescent.

Now it is called The Eisenhower Centre, another entrance being in Tottenham Court Road, by the Whitfield Memorial Church. Bizarrely, at some point in the recent past the flat roof of this one was railed in to provide a safe play area for the nearby Fitzrovia Children’s Centre. But evidence of its true purpose is still there to be seen in the scratchy remains of a painted sign: —D Property —trance strictly —ohibited —out authority.

STAPLE INN

1–3 HIGH HOLBORN, WC1

Today just four Inns of Court survive – Lincoln’s, Gray’s, and Middle and Inner Temple – but, originally called the Inns of Chancery, they were at one time far more numerous. Their original function has never been entirely understood, nor indeed is the derivation of the name clear, although it is thought that they may in earlier times have been involved in the training of medieval Chancery clerks who were charged with preparing the writs in the King’s court.

In about 1530, however, a process of consolidation started as the previously named quartet began to exercise a greater degree of control over the many smaller Honourable Societies. Including Barnard’s, Clement’s, Clifford’s, Furnival’s, Lyon’s, New and Staple, these smaller entities had by this time become little more than preparatory schools for those wishing to read for the law. Denied the right to call their own students to the Bar, each had over many years witnessed a gradual leaking away of student numbers as would-be lawyers enrolled instead with the main four.

Whatever its original purpose, it is known that Staple Inn was founded in 1378. It took its name from the building’s previous function as a weighing-place and warehouse for wool, and as an important meeting place for merchants involved with the valuable wool trade. As a legal entity, though, it was eventually absorbed into Gray’s Inn (which had acquired the freehold of the site in 1529), leaving a range of buildings still more or less intact behind this spectacular sixteenth-century façade of shops and offices. As such it remains by far the most impressive example of a half-timbered structure in London, this despite being much altered and restored over the years by a succession of new owners.

A portion of it, for example, was sold off by Gray’s Inn in 1884 and went to house the Patent Office, while the Prudential spent £68,000 acquiring the majority which it restored over the next two to three years. At this time it was let to the Institute of Actuaries, but in 1944 much of the Prudential’s work was undone by a German V1 which fell into the adjacent gardens. This necessitated an almost total rebuild, completed by Sir Edward Maufe in 1952, prompting some architectural historians to dismiss it as merely pastiche, a picturesque if somewhat unreliable example of Tudor urban building.

Nevertheless, the overall effect today is still striking and, with its oriel windows and jettied upper storeys overhanging a busy modern thoroughfare, it certainly manages to convey an image of a centuries-old London streetscape. An attractive evocation of what entire streets must have looked like nearly 500 years ago, nothing in London can quite match it.

THE BEEFSTEAK CLUB

9 IRVING STREET, WC2

In almost every regard, the architecturally modest Beefsteak is the Athenaeum’s polar opposite (see SW1, p. 129). In place of Athene’s grand temple to academic eminence, it has just a single dining table in a long, panelled, cream-coloured room above a shop. Similarly, while in areas of the Athenaeum conversation is frowned upon or even forbidden, at the Beefsteak it is the very point of the club. Finally, in Waterloo Place the overwhelming sense is one of imperial greatness, academic rigour and quiet self-importance, but the Beefsteak has its origins in the so-called ‘thunder and lightning room’ above the old Covent Garden Theatre.

There the dissimilarities end, however, for in terms of their intellectual achievements, social status and professional distinction, the members of the Beefsteak give nothing away to the Athenaeum or indeed to any other club. For a while, indeed, election to the Beefsteak was so exclusive – restricted to just two dozen members – that as Prince of Wales, even the future George IV was obliged to bide his time until a vacancy occurred.

Founded by Hogarth and his friends in 1730, the original club failed after 137 years but was born again in 1876, since when it has rarely looked back. The membership is still only a few hundred, although with no bar at which to foregather (and only twenty able to sit down at a time) it is probable that many members have never actually met. In recent decades, these have included the dukes of Beaufort and Devonshire, the Harolds Macmillan and Nicolson, and Sir Osbert Lancaster, as well as such literary giants as Kipling, Betjeman and Thomas Hardy, which might explain why, as the late Anthony Sampson was candid enough to admit, ‘many of the junior members like me are too frightened actually to go there.’

Sadly, whether courageous or fearful, no member is any longer obliged to wear the club’s picturesque uniform of blue coats and buff waistcoats (with buttons bearing the legend ‘Beef & Liberty’). Many equally old traditions are maintained, however, including the habit of addressing all servants as ‘Charles’ to avoid confusion, and beefsteaks are naturally always on the menu.

For all that, the current building is no great shakes externally: it is an exercise in fake Jacobean, or what has been called ‘theatreland Lycean’. Designed by Frank Verity, the son of a noted cinema designer, it is indeed by far the most modest of the leading clubs – with the possible exception of Pratt’s. But while Pratt’s (q.v.) is a basement dive, it at least has a respectable address in St James’s. By contrast the Beefsteak is, to say the least, more than a little seedy: a modest doorway opening on to a nondescript pedestrian street running into central London’s least smart square.

All of which lends credence to the most celebrated Beefsteak anecdote, namely that, after observing a succession of old men entering premises opposite a strip joint and emerging a couple of hours later looking happy, relaxed and all’s-well-with-the-world, the police decided to raid the place.

Once inside, it is said, they found four gentlemen sitting beneath the beams, and asked each of them for his particulars.

‘I am the Lord Chancellor,’ said the first of them.

‘Yes, and you sir?’

‘The Archbishop of Canterbury.’

‘Oh yes, and the next?’

‘I am the Governor of the Bank of England.’

‘I see, and I suppose you are the Prime Minister?’

‘In point of fact I am,’ replied A.J. Balfour, before returning to No. 10.

It would be foolish to expect anyone to spoil such a splendid yarn, least of all when it is about his own club, and indeed the only single fact ever to have been disputed about this tale is that the archbishop of the day was never a member. But of course he could always have gone as a guest …

THE GARRICK CLUB

15 GARRICK STREET, WC2

Like the Beefsteak, it is somewhat outside the geographically precise area of clubland proper – which since its creation has never been anywhere but St James’s – but the Garrick is nevertheless one of the better-known clubs in town, as well as the only one to have asked for the street to be named after it. Besides the famous salmon and cucumber tie, the Garrick’s celebrity probably depends on there being so many loose-tongued lawyers and journalists among its members, so that compared with other clubs it is frequently written about in newspaper gossip columns. By far the most embarrassing of such occasions was during the 1987 Spycatcher debacle, when counsel for the defence claimed to have gathered useful intelligence about the prosecution’s tactics simply by listening to the Attorney-General, Lord Havers, discussing his plan of attack while standing at the club urinal.

Founded in 1831 as ‘a society in which actors and men of education and refinement might meet on equal terms’, the Garrick originally met at Probatt’s Family Hotel before moving to what was then still called New King Street. That was in 1864, at which time it was said to be the haunt of ‘nearly all the leading actors’, and by 1958 Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman were being invited to film scenes for Indiscreet within its portals.

These days, though, the Garrick is probably too grand and entry too pricey for most actors to consider, although once inside Frederick Marrable’s handsome Italianate clubhouse its theatrical heritage is still much in evidence. As well as paintings by Johann Zoffany of David Garrick and C.F. Reinhold, and a library full of historic playbills and theatrical biographies, there is on the main staircase a bust of Sir Henry Irving – despite the great Shakespearian having been blackballed when he first applied to join.

Historically the club’s most notorious members were not actors at all, however, but writers, namely Dickens and Thackeray. These two titans of Victorian respectability famously had a stand-up row in the Coffee Room – the Garrick still has the very table – after which each refused to acknowledge the other for more than fifteen years. Fortunately, a reconciliation was eventually effected when they spontaneously shook hands in the hall of the Athenaeum, and just in time, for two weeks later Dickens found himself a mourner at Thackeray’s own final curtain.

Even leaving aside such quarrels, however, the Garrick in its day was rarely a stranger to controversy. The exotically named Lord de Roos, for example, was kicked out for cheating at cards. Journalist John Foster (whom a fellow member described as a ‘low scribbler without an atom of talent and totally unsuited to the society of gentlemen’) came perilously close to it after publishing details of a private Garrick dinner in his newspaper. Best of all, a Mr Sola was forced to tender his resignation after being accused by a housemaid of stealing the soap.

Happily, the Garrick’s 1,300 members these days seem to prefer conversation to kleptomania, to the point where they asked for the club table – at which those eating alone could enjoy the company of other similarly reluctant solo diners – to be narrowed by 6 inches in order that they could better hear each other. A nice touch, and typically Garrick.

YORK WATERGATE

WATERGATE WALK, WC2

Now stranded 150 yards inland, and separated from the water not just by Embankment Gardens but also by a queue of traffic at least four cars deep, one now has only to stand by York Watergate to get a measure of Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s incredible achievements. This is because when Charles Dickens lived nearby at 15 Buckingham Street – a dwelling which had earlier been occupied by Peter the Great and then Henry Fielding – the Thames would have washed right up against the base of the gate, which had been built as the ceremonial river entrance to the gardens of the Duke of Buckingham’s splendid York House.

Bazalgette changed all that, however, confining the tidal river with a series of great embankments – Victoria, Albert and Chelsea. In the process, he created 52 acres of new central London with space beneath the roadways for service pipes, his new low-level sewers, wide tunnels for what was to become the District and Circle Lines, even a pioneering pneumatic railway to run underneath the Thames (although this last was never built). Looking at his work today, it is difficult, if not impossible, to get an accurate impression of what would have been there before, to understand indeed why the Strand was so named. It is similarly hard to credit, as the traffic pushes its way noisily along the busy A3211, that, having originally been a footpath or bridle path along the river, for nearly 400 years it would have been one of the best addresses in England.

Ideally situated between Commerce and the Crown – between the cities of London and Westminster – it was here from about 1200 that a series of palaces sprang up. These included John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace, Durham House (which for a time was home to Simon de Montfort) and numerous ‘inns’ for the powerful abbots of Tewkesbury, Faversham and Winchcombe and for the bishops of Carlisle, Durham and Norwich. The churchmen were in time followed by noblemen, among them George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, a favourite of James I who took over the former lodgings of the bishops of Norwich, although he preferred to live in Whitehall, using his historic riverside mansion merely as a place to entertain.

By 1670, however, the property speculators had moved in and this stretch of the river bank was heavily redeveloped by the likes of Nicholas Barbon. Today as a result there is little left: just the Savoy Chapel, still a personal possession of the monarch, the inevitable street names – because the Duke of Buckingham insisted every part of his name be commemorated there was once an Of Alley here as well as a Duke, George, Villiers and Buckingham Street – and of course the Watergate, dating back to 1626.

Better known for tombs and funerary monuments, it was built by Nicholas Stone. Its designer remains a mystery, however, with different authorities ascribing the Watergate to the builder himself, to Inigo Jones – this was very much the eighteenth-century view – and to Sir Balthasar Gerbier who was in the Duke’s service at this time and was said to have modelled it on the Fontaine de Medicis in Paris’s Luxembourg Gardens. Whoever was responsible, it is a striking piece, highlighting the Villiers’ arms and motto – ‘Fidei coticula crux’ (the touchstone of Faith is the cross) – with the two lions’ shields sporting anchors, symbolising the Duke’s service as Lord High Admiral and Warden of the Cinque Ports.

THE CHARTERHOUSE

CHARTERHOUSE SQUARE, EC1

Having survived both the Great Fire and the Blitz of 1940–41, this small religious relic clinging to the edge of the City is now the only monastic estate in London to survive in anything like its original medieval form. That said, for the last 400 years it has been a retirement home, and in one sense is a pseudo-military establishment being for those delightfully described as ‘decrepit Captaynes either at Sea or Land, and Souldiers maymed or ympotent’.

Originally it was a Carthusian monastery, founded in 1371 by Sir Walter de Manny. Following the Protestant Reformation, during which one monk was forcibly starved to death and its last prior became the first of 105 Catholic martyrs to be executed at Tyburn, it passed through a number of aristocratic hands. Then, in 1611 it was bought by Thomas Sutton, a City merchant originally from Knaith in Lincolnshire. ‘Esteemed the richest commoner in England’, he paid £13,000 for the property and in his will provided it with an endowment to create a school for forty-four poor boys and an almshouse for impoverished gentlemen. In 1872 the school, still known as Charterhouse, relocated to Godalming in Surrey, and three years later the buildings were taken over by another, the Merchant Taylors’ School, until it too left London.

Forty pensioners still remain, however, at what is also called Sutton’s Hospital (or the Hospital of King James). They included the novelist Simon Raven until his death in 2001. They are correctly called Brothers, each having a cell overlooking the main courtyard and the promise of ‘a full library and a full stomach, and the peace and quiet in which to enjoy them both’. Visitors are welcome to join them on one or two guided tours held each Wednesday during the summer months, but for the rest of the year the Brothers enjoy the sort of peace and seclusion only an Oxbridge college could provide (and even then only when free of tourists, and of course free of undergraduates).

With their ancient gardens, the buildings are well worth a visit. Queen Elizabeth I really did sleep here, in 1561, as a guest of Sir Edward North, who was ruined by the expense and had to sell up and retire to the country. James I also stayed here and, after being proclaimed king in the Great Chamber, created 133 new knights on the spot. Situated above the seventeenth-century library, this Great Chamber is said to have been the best Elizabethan interior in the country before it was bombed in 1941.

More than anything, though, the complex of old school and monastic outbuildings presents a welcome contrast to the noise of the City and to the bold Victorian baroque of nearby Smithfield. Part of the west wall of the Carthusian cloister remains, including three entrances to what would have been monks’ dwellings as Carthusians have separate, small houses with their own private gardens; also the sixteenth-century Wash House Court and the original priory gatehouse. This, with its strong oak door, is actually fifteenth century but with upper storeys added in the eighteenth when, with pleasing economy, this portion was again recycled by being absorbed into a domestic dwelling. Now, inevitably, it has been reborn again as offices.

HABERDASHERS’ HALL

18 WEST SMITHFIELD, EC1

While every livery company still fortunate to have a hall has at some point decided to rebuild, or more commonly been forced to, only the Haberdashers have seen fit to do so in the twenty-first century. Another of the Great Twelve, the company was originally an offshoot of the greatest of them, the Mercers. Initially functioning as two separate but related divisions – as hurrers they made and sold hats, while as milliners they imported fashionable apparel from Italy – the breakaway company was finally granted its own charter by Henry VI in 1448. By Elizabethan times it was also importing pins to replace thorns, and charging a sufficiently high price for them that gentlemen were forced to allow their ladies what became known as ‘pin money’ in order that they could pay for a regular supply.

The company’s first hall was built a few years later, in 1461, and situated on the corner of Staining Lane and Maiden Lane (now Gresham Street). Like so many others it fell to the Great Fire, and once again its 1671 replacement was designed by Edward Jerman. Over the years this was extended and modified, particularly after it was again damaged by fire in 1840 and then 1864. The end came in 1940 with another fire following an air raid, after which a new hall, using panelling from the 1730s, was incorporated into an office development on the site.

Forty years later, by which time these offices were up for redevelopment, the decision was taken to acquire a new site in West Smithfield. Sir Michael Hopkins & Partners were commissioned to create a striking and imaginative new hall which was formally opened by the Queen in 2003.

Arranged around a properly secluded, cloistered courtyard (and in this regard like the same architect’s Portcullis House at Westminster), the finished £7.7 million building is entirely contemporary yet in its layout and craftsmanship manages to reflect the long history of its occupants. Despite the apparent luxury of its spacious open courtyard, that same layout also illustrates pressures of working in such a confined space as the modern City: no fewer than six different party wall agreements were necessary before work could start to shoehorn the new building in among the typically haphazard jumble of more conventional offices which already ringed the site.

That craftsmanship is evident everywhere one looks, not just in the 400,000 hand-made bricks with their traditional lime mortar, but also in the contours of its pitched roof which is clad in more than 700 diamond-shaped lead tiles. (With each of these almost 5ft from top to bottom and weighing in excess of 220lb, before anything was attempted on site a prototype roof section was erected as a try-out at Stanford-le-Hope in Essex.)

If one is lucky enough to gain entry, it is in the courtyard that you get the best possible vantage point from which to examine the finished roof. Its rich grey patina provides a striking contrast with the red walls – solid, and more than a foot thick – and with the green of the open space. Very much a triumph of old crafts and new technologies, behind the arched cloisters the interior too is a magnificent space with high vaulted oak ceilings, oak boards for floors and walls panelled in the same durable wood.

HAGAN HOUSE

GOLDEN LANE, EC1

Almost more of a tower within a terrace than just a very narrow house, Jo Hagan’s super-slim seven-storey building north of the Barbican in Golden Lane is perhaps the perfect expression of Londoners’ general preference for houses rather than flats, regardless of how constrained the resulting living space turns out to be. In fact, the house, which has just one room per floor, also finds space for a lift. Not that this formed part of the original, rather minimalist, plan when the architect set out to develop the site for himself; instead it was introduced by the new owner when Hagan sold the project on.

Spread over so many floors it is, while narrow, by no means the smallest house in this part of town. (Architects Sarah Cheeseman and Howard Carter of the partnership Thinking Space have squeezed an even smaller one into a similarly tight space on nearby Club Row.) With a footprint barely larger than a normal single-car garage, Hagan’s creation nevertheless represents an exercise in the clever utilisation of minimal space which is so impressive as to be almost Japanese.

Hence perhaps the almost Zen-like simplicity of the interiors, which can be readily seen from the street, since the façade of the five principal floors is straightforward floor-to-ceiling glass of a stark simplicity, which in turn serves to further emphasise the challenges of building on such a slender plot. Inside, plain white walls and concealed lighting do much to make the interior spaces feel larger and much airier than in fact they are.

It has to be said too, that the challenge of building one of these so-called slot-houses is a huge part of their attraction for the onlooker. Not just because such a project successfully creates out of such unpromising ingredients something more useful and valuable than just a potential fly-tip or another under-utilised parking space. Nor even because when faced with such an example we can all dream about finding another litter-strewn, undervalued pocket of the city and setting out to realise its true potential. Mostly their appeal lies in the ways in which their creators maximise the space, often showing as much ingenuity as those eighteenth-century craftsmen who worked tiny concealed drawers and cubby holes into their escritoires and tallboys, or the creators of the novelty wooden boxes where one must turn this, tweak that, and slide the other in order to gain access.

Thus, just as Seth Stein squeezed a car-lift into his Cheval Place mews house, here Hagan was able to incorporate not only a proper roof garden – effectively making another room – but also a miniature front garden in a wide galvanised-zinc tub by the front door. Containing climbing plants and bamboos, it serves to slightly soften the lines of all that machined, metal-edged glazing and demonstrates again that, even where space is at such a premium, and property prices so outrageous, utility does not need to be the sole guiding principle.

In April 2023, the house was advertised for sale at £1,500,000.

ST JOHN’S GATE

ST JOHN’S LANE, EC1

Like a small castle defending the northern borders of the City, what since 1831 has been the headquarters of the Order of St John was formerly the south or main gatehouse for the great Priory of Clerkenwell. Indeed, it was to this very spot that the Patriarch of Jerusalem, Heraclius, came in 1185 to consecrate a round church, which stood nearby, and to ask Henry II for military assistance in protecting his city against Saladin.

Of the original priory, founded at about this time by a French knight, Jordan de Briset, only the late Gothic gatehouse, a small part of the chancel and the Norman crypt now survive. The first of these was built in 1504 by Grand Prior Sir Thomas Docwra, but sadly very little of what we now see is actually his structure. Instead it has been much restored so that the Tudor-style interiors, for instance, are Victorian recreations by John Oldrid Scott.

Most of its history since the Dissolution has indeed been somewhat unhappy, a fact perhaps prefigured by the death of its prior William Weston on the very day that the act closing his order in England passed through Parliament. In July 1845, there were calls for the entire building to be pulled down as, under the terms of another new act it had been declared a dangerous structure. Worse still, when a notice was circulated that unless it was put into substantial repair it would be demolished, a public subscription directed towards this purpose raised a wholly inadequate sum.