LONDON PALACE

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 67, 21 March 1933, Page 7

LONDON PALACE

COUNTY COUNCIL'S HOME

COMPLETED THIS YEAR

IMPOSING DESIGN

With characteristic lack of flourish, the -world's greatest municipal body, the London County Council, celebrated recently the completion of its palace on the Thames by a quiet tea-party given by the chairman (Mr. Angus Scott) in its north wing, the- last part to be finished, writes "J. 8." in the "Manchester Guardian." The land was acquired in 1906; Mr. Ealph Knott, af the age of thirty, won the architectural competition with his design, and was appointed architect, and work on the site began in 190S; the foundation-stone was laid by the King in 1912, and after •war delays the main building and the south block were opened by the K,ing in 1922. Work on the northern block, ■which is the part farthest down the river, began four years ago, and it is now completed. .The brilliant young architect who designed it all died in 1929 in his fifty-second year without seeing its completion. Most of the members of the council concerned in the scheme at the beginning have also passed away, but at least half a dozen of the present members were there when the first stone was laid. The building, which has cost about £3,800,000, houses a staff of 3500 persons, but so quickly have the council's responsibilities increased that it has still to retain its old building in Spring Gardens for the overflow of its departments. THE FIRST PLAN. Knott's original design underwent material changes after it won the competition in a field of 99 against nearly all the crack architects of his time, including Messrs. Lutyens, Cooper, H. T. Hare, Marshall Mackenzie, Holden, Vincent Harris, Washington Browne, and Plockart. Comparing the original plan a^nd the plan of the completed building, it would seem as though the architect had turned his first design round about, for the crescent' break, in the .middle of the river front appeared at the back in Belvedere Road, where he had placed the grand entrance with a crescent carriage-way." This meant a long way round for visitors, who would mainly come over Westminster Bridge, so he altered his plan and designed the stately Piranesian approach in Westminster Bridge Eoad to the grand entrance in the circular court at that side—Knott's greatest achievement. The councillors desired a terrace for their moments consultation and leisure to enjoy their view of London, which they govern, just as their national colleagues over the way in the Houses of Parliament require their Terrace. Knott's small terrace, in original lay-out on projecting piers with monumental steps, was ruled out by river traffic requirements, and his tallcolumned loggia darkened the Council Hall. So the riversido front was drastically changed and the "bite" introduced, which gives c pleasant semi-circular terrace backed by a range of lonic columns and a reduced lay-out with ornamental steps on the river. The Thames, with its tides and currents, was mot the Grand Canal; but some ghost of operatic Italy does hang about that crescent platform as though it waited for an orchestra to Bet the government of London to music. THE NEW WING. Thus Knott lost his great effect of the long facade that Chambers had so majestically developed in Somerset House. The high-pitched roof with its once red tiles may have been intended to compliment Norman Shaw's Scotland Yard, but with the changing of the line from straight to curve and the awkward returns the effect weakens from the monumental to the ingenious. A circular assembly hall in the first design that was placed in the main courtyard allied to the Council Hall in an attractive way was given up for economy, but in a more elliptical form it has come to life again in the courtyard of tho new wing as a conference hall, with a two-galleried teachers' library for 90,000 volumes ingeniously superimposed Son • it. The corner treatment of this wing itself was altered, the decorative feature at the ends being moved nearer the centre as though the architect had in mind the appearance of this elevation from the proposed Charing Cross Bridge, which has receded from practical affairs since Knott's time. This wing, which, as it is at the thickest end of the site, is the largest, has been developed to meet new demands, and it has several handsome! courtrooms for the hearing of licence applications and conferences. ~ ' Mr. E. Stone Collins, Mr. Knott's partner, whose connection with Mr; Knott goes back to the beginning, was appointed architect in 1929, and has carried on Mr. Knott's ideas with fine understanding, and faced and solved the many new problems that arose with skill" and taste. The library and oak-panelled rooms and much of the internal work are his. The sculpture on the Westminster Bridge Eoad front and some of the Belvedere Eoad work are by Mr. Cole. The rest of the sculpture now being set up on the new wing is by Mr. A. F. Hardiman. All the material in the' new wing is from British sources. THE COUNTY COUNCIL. It must 'strike many as curious that this building, like the great and powerful authority which it symbolises and houses, should not loom up more in national and international imagination. The two reasons, however, are obvious enough. A municipal government, however important, must suffer in scale if it is of a capital which is the ■seat of Parliament, and the London County Council Hall almost faces the Palace of Westminster across tho water. The London. County Council, however, is affected especially by another reason, -and that is the dual control of London, the Lord Mayor and city councillors controlling the actual "City" of London, with their centre at the famous Guildhall. In the eyes of the ordinary foreigner and of many Englishmen the Lord Mayor is still the xuler of London. At the same time there are London county councillors who find advantages in this minimising situation. For it falls to the Lord Mayor and his councillors to do the entertaining of London to the world, and they do it in a grand and practised way, with a richness of appointments and traditional ceremony that the council could not approach if it would. And tbo "City" not only spends money, public and personal, in t_his princely style, but it gives its time and patience as well, which the London County Council would probably be loath to do in this way. So London will continue to get credit in tho world for its hospitality and its Mansion House funds, and the credit goes to the London County Council as well us to the City.

This explains perhaps why London's headquarters, unlike the other Government houses of the great cities of the ivorld, from the Doge's Palace at Venice to Stockholm's new Town Hall, does not rejoice in a great banqueting hall and other grandiosities' of civij entertainment. The building on the Thames, despite the elegance and grace which accompanied all Knott did, suggests a council chamber and a teeming range of offices whose hundreds of windows look sharply out on London.