Hinterland

Admiralty Arch stares at Buckingham Palace – but few know its sad history

For this unique royal weekend (even the youngest child who will remember this Platinum Jubilee will not live to see another one) I wanted to look at a royal building. It is not an obvious one – such as Balmoral, Sandringham, Windsor or Buckingham Palace – but it is paradoxically even more recognisable than at least the first of those two royal residences and has left its imprint on the nation’s historical memory: Admiralty Arch, the gateway from Trafalgar Square to the Mall, down which it stares at Buckingham Palace along the capital’s main ceremonial route.

The Arch has a sad association. Edward VII wanted it built not purely as the administrative building for what was then the finest navy in the world, but as a memorial to his mother, Queen Victoria. Sir Aston Webb, an architect well known to royalty, was asked to design it. Webb had built the Victoria and Albert Museum in South Kensington and was working on a design for the great Queen Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace – whose façade he re-designed and aggrandised in 1913, to give us the building we know today.

He designed Admiralty Arch in 1905-07 but work did not begin until 1908 – and by the time it was completed in 1912, King Edward too was dead. While the work was in progress a Latin inscription was placed over the three central arches, translating as “In the 10th year of King Edward VII, from the most grateful citizens, for Queen Victoria.” The central of the three arches is reserved solely for use by royalty.

It was enlightened to use the same architect at either end of the great processional landscape that is the Mall, and like most Edwardian architecture – including Webb’s other buildings in London, such as his Royal United Services Institute in nearby Whitehall and the Royal School of Mines behind the Albert Hall – it exudes the self-confidence and grandiloquence of the age. There are two wings either side of the three central arches that curve forward towards the Mall, and these housed Admiralty offices. Careful examination of the arches, as one looks from the Mall, reveals two storeys of high-windowed rooms in the left wing below the main cornice, but three storeys of presumably lower-ceilinged rooms on the right.

From the time it opened until the Admiralty was abolished in 1964, the Arch contained the official residence of the First Lord of the Admiralty: its first inhabitant was Winston Churchill, who lived there until the debacle of the Dardanelles forced him out in 1915, though he returned for eight months in 1939-40 before becoming Prime Minister.

The First Sea Lord had a house in the north wing (the left, as seen from the Mall), with a grand oval staircase, but almost concealed from view are three storeys of small offices at the very top of the structure. The overall design is neo-classical. He had one of the leading sculptors of the age, Sir Thomas Brock – who created the vast monument at the centre of Webb’s Queen Victoria Memorial scheme and had a significant part in designing the coinage of King George V – produce stone representations of Navigation and Gunnery that look down the Mall, at the end of the wings. The handsome wrought-iron gates in the centre arch were, when put up, the largest in the country. The style of the buildings would have been recognised by Inigo Jones: they are of a piece with Whitehall, round the corner, as is most of the rest of what is effectively Trafalgar Square.

The great days of the Senior Service are, sadly, behind it, and with the lessening of our defence establishment so too has Admiralty Arch changed its function. For a time it housed some of the cabinet office and had the odd grace and favour flat sometimes put at the disposal of ministers with domestic difficulties. Then, in 2011, as part of the great austerity drive, it was sold on a 125-year lease to an upscale hotel chain. By early 2024, we are told, part of this breathtaking landmark will be one of London’s smartest hotels, and the rest will be extortionately expensive apartments.

But at least the restoration of Admiralty Arch will be lavish and, we are assured, entirely sympathetic – and once some of its spaces are made public, one will finally be able to inspect the architectural splendour that

Webb created, without needing to become an admiral or a mandarin to do so. And there is something wearily familiar about what was once an incarnation of our command of the oceans surviving as a playground for rich foreigners.

Its first inhabitant was Winston Churchill, until the Dardanelles debacle forced him out