When a building first disappears from London’s landscape it’s as if the face of a friend has suddenly changed — glasses swapped for contact lenses, or a beard shaved off. It’s strange but we soon become acclimatised. Something new “comes out of the ground”, as architects and planners put it, and the original structure is quickly forgotten: who now remembers Nine Elms cold store by the Thames at Vauxhall, or what London Bridge looked like before the Shard?
I’m not writing off London’s heritage lightly — I miss the Astoria in Charing Cross Road and the other buildings sacrificed to Crossrail. I still mourn the Hand and Racquet in Whitcomb Street behind Leicester Square, which fell foul of the development of the Odeon West End site. But I also know cities must grow and change and I have learned to savour the short, interim stage when the gaps where buildings used to be have the capacity to startle.
I can’t say I’ve ever noticed the grey block on the corner of Marble Arch and Great Cumberland Street, home at ground level to a McDonald’s and a bureau de change, until the demolition of another Odeon in Edgware Road afforded everyone a view of its staggered western side and slanting fire escapes. It’s like looking backstage at a theatre, a brief glimpse of an elevation that was never meant to be seen, and which will soon be masked by a new tower.
Similarly, I now can’t remember what stood on the spot in Wilton Street at Hyde Park Corner which will soon host the Peninsula Hotel. But on my morning bus commute I am taken aback by the openness of the sky above the building site, and the new views of glorious Georgian Forbes House in Halkin Street. The bus affords further glimpses of sky and hitherto unseen buildings behind the empty windows of a retained facade on Kensington High Street, opposite Hyde Park: the entire building behind this frontage has gone.
We think of London as a city of edifices and structures but it is also one of voids. When buildings are demolished they don’t just give us an altered vista above ground, they remind us of the teeming life below. The deep excavations of new buildings, and the vast shafts dug for Crossrail and the Northern line extension, have opened huge portals into subterranean London, caverns criss-crossed with water mains and gas pipes. There’s so much stuff down there we don’t know about or had forgotten: the automated Post Office railway, now open for paying customers at Mount Pleasant; the Georgian ice house near Regent’s Park.
At Farringdon there’s a grate where you can allegedly hear the Fleet River (or, I hope, something clean running into it, since the Fleet is now a sewer).
I lived on my street in Oval for 23 years before noticing the plaque marking the Effra, another buried Thames tributary. The advice I used to give tourists was to look up, to notice the statues and friezes. But it’s also good to look into London’s voids, to see what lies beneath.
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