Scrapers

Owen Hatherley will be talking about the absence/presence of British skyscrapers (as opposed to high-rises, a very different thing) as part of In The Shadow of Senate House. 11th December, 5pm in room 102, 30 Russell Square, Bloomsbury, London.

Towers Open Fire

As Beveridge’s well-worn anecdote regarding the cab-driver and the Royal School of Needlework demonstrates, throughout the early twentieth-century there was a need to impress the University of London onto the cognitive maps of even the most cartographically astute Londoners. Consequently, a key aspect of the brief for Senate House involved constructing a tower that would establish the institution as a presence on the capital’s skyline. A decade or so later this desire for a notable landmark would inadvertently provide a useful guide for the Luftwaffe during their lethal bombing raids (leading to the oft-repeated urban myth that Hitler had favoured Senate House as a potential Nazi command post).

No architectural competition was held for Senate House. After the initial selectors shuffled through the remnants of a rather Edwardian directory to hedge their bets with fourteen possible architects, the final committee nominated a new short-list of four: Giles Gilbert Scott; Arnold Dunbar Smith; Percy Scott Worthington; Charles Holden. A combination of factors steered the selectors towards Holden. Championed by Beveridge from inside the committee and given influential external support by Frank Pick, Holden was the only candidate to bring preliminary sketches to the series of black-tie dinners held for each finalist at the Athenaeum. He had also recently designed 55 Broadway as the new tower-topped HQ for a rapidly expanding and modernizing London Underground. Completed in 1929 on a restricted site near St James’s Park, the dexterously monumental building not only proved that Holden could manage a large scale project but also suggested that he would bring to the design of Senate House a palatable modernity capable of communicating the progressive momentum of the University.

Holden was not the only short-listed candidate with a proven track record in designing towers. In 1903, at the tender age of 22, Giles Gilbert Scott had won the competition to design Liverpool Cathedral. Scott’s reputation rose alongside the cathedral as it began to take shape over the rooftops of Hope Street – albeit with his own telling redesign that replaced the original plan for twin towers with a massive central tower. A scion of a prolific architectural dynasty, Scott had the highest public profile on the Senate House short-list. A series of inter-war church commissions had made him one of the most sought after ecclesiastical architects of the period. Yet for those with a penchant for counterfactuals, it is the educational and industrial structures that Scott’s small office handled that encourages speculation on the likely form of his unbuilt tower for Senate House.

South London has offered fertile ground for Scott’s skyscraping landmarks. After construction had begun on J. Theo Halliday’s design for Battersea Power Station in 1929, Scott was brought in as consultant architect to finesse the detailing of the titanic brickwork exterior and chimneys. In 1932 he finished the William Booth Memorial Training College, another extended essay in brick with a massive tower that looms over the lost souls of Denmark Hill (shortly afterwards he completed the similarly monolithic ‘dark tower’ of Cambridge University Library – celebrating its 75th anniversary this month). A much later work than any of these is Bankside Power Station, designed by Scott a few miles downriver from the Battersea matrix.

As Cedric Price astutely observed, the slender square tower of Bankside (now glowingly Tate Modernized) sticks a brickwork middle finger up to St Paul’s Cathedral across the water. Could this have been an unconscious gesture of spiritual defiance from a Catholic architect who had intermittently spent his entire adult life attempting to terminate an Anglican edifice? Could the affable GG Scott have secretly been a repressed GG Allin of architecture? Or was that middle finger more emblematic of the unconvincing ‘middle line’ that Scott insisted on navigating between such phantom monoliths as modernism and tradition? (Rather than an answer to these questions, a neighbourly aside suddenly springs to mind: it should be noted that for almost forty years Cedric Price’s innovative architectural office operated just beyond Senate House on the corner of Alfred Place and Store Street.)

For those who find themselves in the shadow of Senate House there is a far easier way to visualize a possible version of what Scott’s tower would have looked like. It takes the form of the K6 phone-box located on the Malet Street side of the south block of Senate House itself. Mass-produced in 1936 as a more economic variant of the K2, the famously Soane-inspired kiosk was first sketched by Scott in the mid-1920s after he had been appointed a trustee of the Soane museum. During August of this year the Malet Street phone-box was given what appeared to be a sub-Sophie Calle makeover. Although I used to walk down Malet Street almost every morning, by the time I had registered the continued presence of a folding chair, cushions, and blanket inside the phone-box, the accompanying message handwritten on sheets of paper stuck to the kiosk’s rectangular glass panels had faded into illegibility.

End of.

below or above, Southgate Tube Station was always a trip for a suburban teenager in the 1970s and ‘80s. Surfacing from the Piccadilly line entailed a vertiginous sweep up chocolately escalators, scattered with cigarette ends, and past lights emanating a dreamy glow that was seemingly from another century. Neared from street-level, it was even more delirious. At a certain moment the spinning-top peeked around the corner, pulsating from its non-stop roundabout. It was a circular beacon, with an electro-bauble on the top and dotted with myriad entrance-exits in between boutique shops that were not ever for the likes of pocket-moneyed me. Its seductive curve was mirrored on the other side of the bus lanes in the signaged-for-eternity shops of the Parade. Everything about it was transporting – and, for me, it was always the nearby lodestar of different sites of pleasuring: the swimming pool, first, then the cinema, then Soul and Rock and Roll Nights at the Royalty Ballroom, and finally, Our Price Records and punk gigs (compacting with the underground itself, one was by Moorgate and the Tube Disasters, who assaulted the audience with a pig’s head). Arnos Grove, by contrast, was sobering and, with no other buildings in the vicinity, a marooned planet. I think of it only as a glorious disc under vast suburban skies to be contemplated in a state of melancholy during the always too long sojourns at the bus stop opposite, the dazzle of the West End now far up the line, home a humdrum terminus.

Indescribable Unbloomsbury

Psycho-geo-graphical Blumsbrie

Dorothy, a Secretary or a Spy?

"MI5 Files show how special branch feared uni administrator leaked to USSR

With a shock of unruly hair and an austere stare flashing through her tiny-framed glasses, Dorothy Galton was known at the University of London as a fearsome nit picker of a school secretary.

When she died in 1992, obituary writers could not help but mention her 'formidable' and 'autocratic' approach to the running of the School of Slavonic Studies in Senate House, Bloomsbury.

But files released this week by the National Archives show that MI5 thought she was far more dangerous than a bossy boots who simply berated students for wrongly filled out forms or overdue library books.

Special Branch officers thought Ms Galton was a spy.

The files reveal that for 20 years of her life she was tailed by secret agents who were convinced Ms Galton, who lived for several years in South Hill Park Gardens, Hampstead, was leaking information to Russia at the start of the Cold War.

Between 1932 and '36, she was openly a member of the St Pancras Communist Party, but gave up her subscription to conduct 'special research projects'.

This, the files show, aroused secret services' fears that Ms Galton, who had visited the USSR, had inappropriate access to sensitive information on armed forces personnel who enrolled at the university to quickly learn foreign languages.

Her phones were tapped and her mail was intercepted – although the messages that were discovered had little more information than her joy at riding a mini-motorbike and plans to buy a car and move to a cottage in Essex.

The files, which relate to surveillance carried out throughout the 1930s and 1940s, show how Special Branch officers tried to monitor the rise of Communist debates within the University.

They read 'A powerful personality in the school is the secretary, Dorothy Galton, a most unpleasant and seriously unbalanced woman and the only person in the place which makes a serious attempt at administration. She is by no means efficient, yet through her policy of interfering in every aspect of the school's activities, she exerts considerable influence. Most of the emigre East European students and some of the Americans were met by her with hostility but the Communists find in her a valuable friend.'

The documents, two beefy files of scribbled notes and typed dossiers which have been made available for download on the Public Records Office's website, show how 'discreet enquiries' were ordered to be carried out on the Hampstead neighbourhood where she lived. It was claimed by Special Branch that the NW3 district had many Communist sympathisers.

'We have proved that Miss Galton has access to restricted information', said one secret report. 'The most damning allegation is that the whole of the (School of Slavonic Studies) is unprotected from Miss Galton's 'snooping', or 'from the inquisitive gaze of the Russian intelligence.'

Another report said: 'It would seem wrong that a person of Miss Galton's record should have access to any classified information'.

While they suspected information was being siphoned out of the university's filing cabinets and to eastern Europe, the reports suggest that secret agents failed to find any conclusive proof.

Ms Galton retired from the school in 1961 and went on to keep bees in her retirement and wrote books on bees' wax and honey. She died aged 90 having never married, owned property or used a bank account."

Richard Osley, Camden New Journal 3/9/09

Walk Two: Piccadilly Line, October 4

In 1930 Frank Pick, the managing director of London Transport, took his architect Charles Holden on a tour round Europe to find inspiration for new tube lines that would inch into rural Middlesex. You can see signs of what they found everywhere on the Piccadilly Line stations they built in the early 1930s. So on this tube journey we will find brickwork borrowed from the Hilversum of Wilhelm Marinus Dudok, the weird expressionist ceilings of Manor House, the rectilinear watchtower of Turnpike Lane, the bauhaus unsupported glass corners of Bounds Green, the cinema-style kiosk architecture of Wood Green, the serene, severe Swedish classicism of Arnos Grove, the Metropolis fantasia of Southgate, with its curving shopping parade, topped with a futuristic beacon. Finally, we come to the concrete concourse of Cockfosters, which seems to usher you into Mitteleuropa rather than the commuter belt.

The Piccadilly Line extension is what interwar London had in lieu of an avant-garde, a total artwork made up of architecture and signage by Charles Holden, posters by E McKnight Kauffer or Moholy-Nagy, to sit on tube seats designed by Marion Dorn and Paul Nash. Modernism was not allowed into the heritage city, so it set up its illuminated outposts in the outer suburbs, in a doomed attempt at changing the centre from the periphery. So while on this journey we will try to imagine these tube stations stretched up to 20 storeys – their expanses of glass, their crepuscular London light, the signscape of their posters, light fittings, roundels, decorated tiles and friezes – into a glorious modernist skyscraper which would be everything the stone severity of Senate House is not. Meeting at Russell Square Station, 2pm, Sunday October 4 2009.

Walk One: Bloomsbury, Saturday October 3

This walk will explore the locale of Senate House looking at Holden’s monolith from a number of viewpoints, visual and conceptual. We’ll consider its local presence as a hub of time, space, ideas, resistances and recurrences.

The walk starts in Russell Square, moving into Holden’s entrance hall and northwards into Torrington Square. We’ll appraise the truncated scheme against Waugh and Giedion’s responses:

….the vast bulk […] insulting the autumnal sky

….the monstrous three-hundred foot tower which thrusts itself upward like an explosion to shatter forever the serenity and cohesion of the district lying below.

Northwards past the Church of Christ the King (which also ran out of money before it was finished) and through Gordon Square, the completion of an earlier huge local planning endeavour. From there to UCL and the University’s original local presence; a nod to recent built bulk (UCH and the Wellcome Building); a long trawl southwards down Gower Street picking up the 1920s London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (also built with the help of American money). Here we can note the overwriting of Keppel Street (an 1848 Chartist route). Then to a distinctive evaluation point where Senate House and the Edwardian aspect of the British Museum face each other. From there through Bedford Square and into Great Russell Street, stopping at Congress House for a bit of post-War modernism and an example of the Epstein omitted from the Senate House façade. Through into Bloomsbury Square and an encounter with Victoria House, an earlier local megalith and a precedent for the overwriting of local scale. Along to Southampton Row and its contribution to post-War Bloomsbury diversification, and back to Russell Square and a glimpse of the Brunswick Centre and the Institute of Education. Cohesion lost – or differently configured?

The walk will take about 1.5 hours and will end with drinks in Senate House.

Guides and interrogators will be Henderson Downing, Owen Hatherley and Victoria McNeile, research students at Birkbeck. Guest expert is Christopher Woodward, co-author of A Guide to the Architecture of London: 4th ed, August 2009.

Meet in Russell Square at 3pm, 3/10/09.

When in doubt, leave it out

The other key client for the eventual building, Lord Beveridge, upon becoming director of the LSE, asked a cab driver to take him to the University of London. The cabby 'looked blank. As I explained, a light broke on him. "Oh, you mean the place near the Royal School of Needlework." I discovered that this was what I did mean.'

As an pointer to the many secrets it holds - a detailed investigation of the Senate House, from the archives of City of Sound.

In the Shadow of Senate House is a series of events taking place in and around Birkbeck College, University of London in Autumn/Winter 2009. Birkbeck sits literally in the shadow of Senate House on Russell Square. Our research also has the monolith’s shadow cast across it in various ways, for we are all investigating modern and contemporary city fabric and the politics and poetics of inhabiting urban space. Victoria McNeile is writing a social and cultural history of Russell Square. Owen Hatherley is exploring the political aesthetics of modernist building. Henderson Downing is following the trails of paranoid city stalker Iain Sinclair. In addition, we are users of the library, but we also pass through the building on our journeys through Bloomsbury.

We are all fascinated in the everyday and extraordinary activities that happen around its fringes – the clatter of suitcases as people struggle to and from the many hotels; the historical rustles in the bushes at Russell Square; the distant echo of Chartists gathering in the square on 10 April 1848; the alternative institutions in the shadows from the marginalised religious sects to today’s non-academic academies; ‘the School of Life’ on Marchmont St or ‘Aquarium’ on Woburn Place or the ‘Public Reading Rooms’, further down on Caledonian Road; occultist Bloomsbury; the urban legends that attach to the building and re-circulate – Hitler’s headquarters, bunkers in the basement, troglodytes in the tube line. What we propose is a multiple stranded exploration – which does not attempt to tell an official history of the building, but rather to see how the building has produced or obliterated modes of life in its shadow. (This is, in a sense, an imaginative pre-empting of what might yet come to be our actual exclusion from the building, if certain moves are made within the University of London). This is not simply an examination of Senate House, but rather the building is a stand from which to hang a number of themes pertinent to living, studying and passing through an old Moderne city.