Town Mouse
Wandering through London these days, it is common to see vast wastelands appear where a building used to be. It’s as if an intelligent bomb has been at work. I remember walking up Farringdon Road recently and seeing an empty space where the fairly grotty Guardian building had stood the day before. Then a new construction of glass and steel popped up with astonishing rapidity.
It’s the same around Tottenham Court Road tube station. Now you see it, now it disappears… now something more splendid appears in its place. And it has to be said that the new buildings are of a much higher standard than the old, depressing 1960s and 1970s concrete blots they are replacing. The new edifices are often green in colour, made of glass and look quite beautiful.
Reading an excellent walker’s guide to Victorian London by Christopher Winn, I learn that this mania for building is, of course, nothing new; in Victorian times, it was a good deal more manic. But the Victorians created more places for reflection, and emphasised beauty and wonder over pure utility.
The city’s population grew from around one million on the day of the eighteen-year-old queen’s accession in 1837 to more than seven million in 1901, when she died. And the Victorians built and built and built during that period.
While my real affection is for Georgian and 18th-century styles, one has to admit that the Victorians were good at architecture. I like the way they were influenced by medieval styles and loved decoration, in contrast to the plain, unadorned styles that preceded and followed them.
My west London house is a three-bed, Victorian, terraced abode, built for local workers. Even such modest dwellings brim with cornicing, picture rails and foliate carvings on the outside. Very respectful, I think, to the inhabitants. Uplifting.
The ultimate neo-gothic building is the Houses of Parliament, designed by Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin and completed in 1870 after a thirty-year build. It is actually a peculiar and self-conscious structure when you think about it – showy. And the selfregard of the architects seems to have rubbed off on the MPS and peers within it, who buzz about from meeting to meeting with an air of White Rabbit-style self-importance.
Luckily, most of the Victorian buildings will not disappear, as they are protected or just very well-built. No one wants to knock them down any more. Until fairly recently, demolitionmad town planners agreed with P G Wodehouse’s line in Summer Moonshine (1937): ‘Whatever may be said in favour of the Victorians, it is pretty generally admitted that few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.’
And Winn’s book reminds you just how much of London is Victorian. The pubs, the churches, the clubs, the houses, the museums, the streets, the mansion blocks, the train stations, the theatres, the hospitals – London is a Victorian city. What really struck me was the wealth of Victorian illustrators, artists and writers. As we wander around Kensington, Winn points out that this grand house here was built by an illustrator for Punch, this one here by one of Dickens’s illustrators. Sculptors such as Thomas Thornycroft, who made the statue of Queen Boadicea on Westminster Bridge, must have been doing pretty well to have built himself two houses on Melbury Road.
You would have to be a pop star, banker or Google executive to live there now: Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page lives at Tower House, Melbury Road. He bought it in 1972 for £350,000 from the actor Richard Harris. It was built by architect William Burges and in the hall there is a mosaic of Theseus slaying the Minotaur. Robbie Williams lives next door.
The Pre-raphaelite Sir John Everett Millais also coined it in. He was the Damien Hirst of his day. Millais lived at 2 Palace Gate, Kensington, which he could afford because he was earning the equivalent of £2 million a year.
Millais’s pad was absurdly sumptuous. There was a fountain on the landing in the form of a black marble seal that spouted water into a marble basin. When the historian Thomas Carlyle – not rich, though renting a lovely house in Cheyne Row for £35 a year – visited the opulent mansion, he asked, ‘Has paint done all this, Mr Millais?’ The artist replied, ‘It has.’ Carlyle countered, ‘Then there are more fools in the world than I thought there were.’
The house is now occupied by the Zambia High Commission and is probably priceless, given that threebedroom flats nearby are going for £6 million.
Ah, the days when magazine illustrators and painters could build themselves mansions in Kensington are sadly long gone. Though it is true that the former publisher of the Viz comic (which sold hugely in the 1980s), who is now on the advisory board of the Oldie, did buy himself a mansion in Holland Park.
Winn’s brilliant Walk Through History: Discover Victorian London has reminded Town Mouse that the Victorian era was profoundly creative and artistic, and also valued creative production; it was not just about cotton mills and utilitarianism. I recommend it highly as a companion to that peerless and completely free pastime – just bumbling around old London town.