Sat, Nov 15 · 12:00 PM GMT
THE OVER, THE UNDER
To find out, we're going to meet in the shadow of a magnum opus and set off to see some work from this salon des refusés , those chef d’œuvres manqués : great but overlooked achievements!
Coincidentally, our route takes us over a densely-packed neighborhood, two rivers, and along an ancient drainage ditch that once surrounded a South Bank neighborhood, with a delightful name, before the river was bridged and a wide approach road was driven through it in the 1760’s…and under a railway viaduct, a brutalist building and into the bowels of the earth, to an extraordinary subterranean space said to have been inspired by Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s stage set for the ‘Hall of Stars’ from Mozart’s ‘The Magic Flute’ .
‘The Unsung’ wouldn't stay unsung for long if I sang their praises, so here’s a description of the route which respects their anonymity.
We’ll meet on a recent retail mezzanine where you can go high up under the roof of a major London terminus and survey the teeming concourse below.
Then, a station originally built to connect 2 networks, and whose name has changed 3 times, provides a walking route with views of a less well-known part of London, (and of an unexpectedly good 1970’s 25-storey tower, the redeveloped home of an Edwardian club for military rank-and-file) to a modern tube station whose interior spaces evoke mineshafts or deep shelters, and are utterly unique.
Passing an unaltered Government-owned brutalist building, we approach a mid-century church, the third on this site, described by Nicholas Pevsner as ‘feeble’. It is nevertheless a Listed Building, but by virtue only of its stained glass.
Up on to a station which is also a bridge*, making land-fall on the N bank, close to the site of a fortified castle, which existed in multiple forms between the Norman Conquest and the Fire of London. A brutalist telephone exchange, named for the castle, and incorporating a high-speed underpass along the river’s edge, was built on the site in the 1970’s. Its height was restricted to 4 storeys to protect views of St. Paul’s.
Crossing a mid-Victorian Road Improvement, which includes tunnels and stations under it, and climbing up one of the City's few hills, we emerge to see how a 19th century rail line was reconfigured from a viaduct to a tunnel, and road and pavement levels had to be raised outside the new sub-surface station. A visionary achievement, but its post-modern interior design is disappointing. Indeed, so saddled, that when extended, the owners were obliged to continue with the same costly detailing.
However, it is a convenient subway*, and takes us to the site of another station, now abandoned, one of only 4 to be permitted in the centre of London after the Royal Commission on Metropolitan Railway Termini 1846 confined them to the City’s periphery. Ironically, despite being the one located closest to the heart of the city, it was under- and eventually dis-used.
It was named for the nearby 1869 Road Improvement, recently impressively restored and re-gilded, on a Roman route that bridges over the valley of a lost river and has saved generations from having to descend into a deep valley and ascend the other side.
We’ll see the site of the only rail link between N and S London, opened in 1866, closed to passengers 50 years later but reinstated, as the critical piece in the Thameslink network, in 1990.
On the western slopes of the valley, opposite, we find a rare survival of extreme 1970’s brutalism, a fine example of the genre, with massive pre-cast concrete spandrels and monster columns. At each corner a gaping mouth. Once occupied by Deloitte, it is to be replaced by an APT-designed scheme twice as high, containing 3 times the floor space, with heavily planted terraces at every level.
Finally, in a tangle of ancient alleyways near the end of our walk is the late 17th Century house that bears the name of the most distinguished man of letters in English history, and author of a Dictionary of the English language which was pre-eminent for 150 years and was only supplanted in 1911. He was not a native Londoner, was resident here for only 11 years, and lived in 18 other houses in London (all now lost). So it doesn't especially reflect his character, but it is Listed Grade 1, and one of a very few houses of its period to survive in the City of London.
And afterwards at ‘The Pret’ at 217 Strand, built into the repurposed 1882 Lloyds' Bank building. The largest, grandest, most Listed you have ever seen!
Hope you can come!
Andy
*Please bring an Oyster Card or similar ticket valid for TfL Zone 1 if you have one.
