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.