SIMON HEFFER HINTERLAND

Turn your back on Trafalgar Square’s tree and get an eyeful of its architecture

Trafalgar Square is a symbol of London around the world. At this time of year, it is the site of the great Christmas tree donated to the city by the people of Oslo since 1947, and a focus of New Year’s Eve celebrations. Yet when we visit this great space, we do not inevitably look closely at the buildings that make the square. This is a shame, because they represent a splendid slice of our cultural history.

Trafalgar Square was the site of the Royal Mews, cleared in the 1820s. John Nash, the Regency architect who had laid out a tract of London from

Regent’s Park to the Mall, envisaged a building like the Parthenon in the middle of the square to house the

Royal Academy. He died before progress could be made: but as buildings were demolished and a road put across the churchyard of St Martin-in-the-Fields, the great project began. The idea was to lay out a square named King William IV: but it was later decided to name it after the great sea-battle of 1805 at Cape Trafalgar.

William Wilkins sought to succeed Nash. He had made a reputation as a neoclassical architect, starting with Downing College, Cambridge, but also built effectively in the emerging

Gothic revival style, notably at two other Cambridge colleges – Corpus Christi and King’s – in the 1820s. On the north of the square, where stables had stood, he reverted to neoclassical in building the National Gallery, from 1832 to 1838, before his death in 1839.

Charles Barry, rebuilder of the

Palace of Westminster after it burned down in 1834, enhanced the grandeur of Wilkins’s gallery with a terrace, reached by flights of steps from a levelled square where there had been a slope, the earth from which helped level Green Park. The square itself was covered with asphalt (the present stone pavement dates from the Twenties) and plinths were dotted around.

The square lacked a focal point: but in 1838 a committee determined to perpetuate Nelson’s memory moved that he should be commemorated there. William Railton, an architect who had specialised in ecclesiastical buildings, suggested Nelson’s Column, a classical pillar with a statue on top. It is only two thirds of the height Railton wished, and the lions he had envisaged did not come until 1867, designed by

Sir Edwin Landseer. The column itself was finished in 1843, and the square was opened to the public the next year.

The decision to lower the square unquestionably elevated Wilkins’s gallery, but the building remains unsatisfactory: it should have been taller, and the dome that crowns it is just too small. It lacks the distinction of St Martin’s church, its easterly neighbour that is not in the square but which, like the statue of Edith Cavell just outside it, watches over it. Built by James Gibbs in the 1720s, it has none of the suggestion of penny-pinching that comes with Wilkins’ work.

The square has no coherent south side, but instead a small roundabout at the top of Whitehall with a 17thcentury statue of Charles I on what was once Charing Cross. On either side are commercial buildings of the Belle Époque. The east and west sides of the square, however, evoke both our imperial past and the self-conscious grandeur of 19th- and early 20thcentury architecture. On the west, Canada House – used for that purpose since 1925 – was built by Sir Robert Smirke, architect of the British Museum, in the 1820s. It is a classical building that once housed the Royal College of Physicians and a gentlemen’s club. On the east, a hotel was replaced by Herbert Baker’s anachronistic South Africa House of 1930-33, which is in keeping with the rest of the square but smacks of the classical revival at a time when the predominant style was art deco: Baker sought to echo St Martin’s. The result is an unattractive pastiche.

The last great architect in Trafalgar Square is Sir Edwin Lutyens. If, as one does, one chooses to jump in the fountains as midnight strikes on New Year’s Eve, the thought that he designed the centrepieces might warm you, if nothing else does.