WHITEHALL REDEVELOPMENT

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30808, 21 July 1965, Page 17

WHITEHALL REDEVELOPMENT

(N Z P A -Reuter—Copyright) LONDON, July 20. Whitehall—the complex of grubby, sootstained ministerial offices—is to be replanned and redeveloped for the first time for 500 years. The Government accepted in principle this week a comprehensive plan to free its choked streets of traffic and transform Parliament square into a precinct modelled on a college quadrangle.

King Henry VIII was the last man to attempt to plan Whitehall as a place from which to govern England. Sir Leslie Martin, a 56-year-old professor of architecture at Cambridge, and Professor Colin Buchanan, Britain’s leading town planner and traffic expert, have launched a fresh attempt in a minutely detailed 170-page report.

Their ideas will take at least 50 years to unfold, although Mr Charles Pannell, the Minister of Public Building and Works, said detailed planning would begin as soon as possible.

Under the plan, all through traffic will gradually be elim-

inated from the area, new roads will be constructed around Whitehall and a road tunnel built beside the River Thames. Parliament' square will become a precinct dominated by the Palace of Westminster, which contains both Houses of Parliament, and 900-year-old Westminster Abbey visited by five million people annually. The historic square will be reserved for buildings associated with State and Government. The report suggested a new annex for Parliament opposite the present building and linked to it by an underground covered way.

The planners want to retain Downing street. Westminster Central Hail, the centuries-old banqueting hall from which King Charles I stepped to his execution, the House Guards, Admiralty House and Scotland Yard. Whitehall today accommodates nearly 15,000 civil servants in 19 Government buildings, all but one more than 50 years old. Thousands more Government workers occupy 151 leased buildings The new Whitehall plan will concentrate them all in specially-designed space-sav-ing offices. Many Government workers will be shifted to areas outside the capital.