Overlooked Britain Lucinda Lambton
lucinda lambton
A gleaming, groaning-with-the-weightof-its-marble Masonic Temple is not what you would expect to find on the first floor of one of London’s 19th-century railway hotels.
Yet there it is, built in twelve different hues, in what was then the Great Eastern Hotel – now renamed the Andaz Hotel – at Liverpool Street Station.
This giant hostelry was designed by Edward and Charles Barry – two of the five sons of the Charles Barry who was behind the Palace of Westminster – in 1884, when the Morning Advertiser described it as ‘unquestionably the most palatial hotel in London’.
There were 267 bedrooms and fourteen quite exceptional public rooms. The Hamilton Hall was 100ft long and adorned throughout with rococo plasterwork, smothered in gold leaf, and further enlivened with flesh-coloured cherubs. It was modelled on the Palais Soubise in Paris. Then there was the Abercorn Bar by Colonel R W Edis – another distinguished architect involved
in the hotel’s creation. He built in the late-elizabethan style, with a plaster ceiling fashioned to look like Spanish leather. It was said that the Great Eastern ‘possessed a brilliance rarely found east of Charing Cross’. There were bonuses galore, including the hotel’s private railway track that bought in a daily supply of fresh seawater for the saltwater baths.
In 1912, the Barrys were again called in to mastermind two great masonic halls, one of which was to be the Egyptian Temple, enhanced by elegantly tapered doors and murals of muted shades.
The Grecian Temple, with architects Brown and Barrow, was the star of our show. With its wealth of marble and mahogany, it was – and still is – a stupendous exercise in opulence that cost £50,000, the equivalent of £4 million today.
The domed zodiac ceiling of violent turquoise, with its eight-pointed ‘blazed star’, encircled by masonic signs in deep gilded relief, reigns supreme. It was built at the behest of Lord Claud Hamilton, who was both a freemason and chairman of the Great Eastern Railway. (Such alliances between the railways and the masons were not uncommon as they marched in tandem towards the new world.)
Not only was this gleaming symbol of their importance created at the chairman’s behest, it was also thanks to his family, as well as fellow masons, and directors of the railway company, who privately paid for the whole bang lot!
The first grand master was the Duke of Connaught and, most suitably, a bronze bust of his likeness still guards the place. Bronze sconces, bearing glass ‘flames’ aloft, set the pink marble glowing.
The fame of this station hotel has spread far and wide; written of by Bram Stoker in Dracula, no less, when the vampire-hunter Abraham Van Helsing stays there during his first visit to London.
Then there was W G Sebald who was bewitched by the place, writing in Austerlitz – with his thickset web of associations – of pondering on the passage of time; with the Great Eastern having been built on the site of the notorious Bethlehem Royal Hospital for the insane, founded in 1247.
Whenever Sebald went, he found himself ‘obsessively trying to imagine where the asylum inmates were confined, and I often wondered whether the pain and suffering accumulated on this site over the centuries had ever really ebbed away or whether they might not still, as I sometimes thought when I felt a cold breath of air on my forehead… be sensed as we pass through’. He delighted in the Masonic Temple, going there to ‘simply marvel at the strange edifices we construct’.
Today, time has decreed that the Great Eastern has been sleeked up to anodyne modernism, while the Grecian Temple has kept every inch of its Edwardian distinction so splendidly intact.