The London Journal
A Review of Metropolitan Society Past and Present
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Architecture of London
Aileen Reid
To cite this article: Aileen Reid (2019) Architecture of London, The London Journal, 44:3, 242-244,
DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2019.1675263
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03058034.2019.1675263
Published online: 01 Nov 2019.
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the london journal, Vol. 44 No. 3, November 2019, 242–244
Exhibition Review
Architecture of London, Guildhall Art Gallery, London EC2, £10 or concessions. Until 1
December.
David Hepher, Albany Flats, 1977–9. © David Hepher, courtesy of Flowers Gallery; Photo:
Tate, London 2019.
Where do you stand to get an idea of London? In the heart of Trafalgar Square, or on the
heights of Greenwich Park looking towards the City? On a boat under Westminster Bridge, or
from the top of a tower on the South Bank or the Barbican or Nine Elms? Or is the
essence of London to be found in an unconsidered byway of Merton or Wandsworth, or in
a half-remembered walk through Canonbury to the City, or even in a reflection of St Paul’s
in the glassy surface of the new Stock Exchange, or a mouldering brick parapet in Hackney?
It is in all of these places, according to The Architecture of London, an exhibition of 80
works at the Guildhall Art Gallery. This is not a conventional survey of London architecture,
as it is not chronological or comprehensive, nor is it art historical either, as although it covers
the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries, there is no attempt to be representative of every
period – the Victorians get rather short shrift, both the painters and the architects. And
though more than half of the works come from the Guildhall Art Gallery’s own collection,
they do not directly reflect the collection’s evolution as a repository of art of the City Corporation. Just as the Corporation’s archive, the London Metropolitan Archives, collects material
© 2019 Aileen Reid
DOI 10.1080/03058034.2019.1675263
EXHIBITION REVIEW
243
Uzo Egonu, Tower Bridge, 1969. © The estate of the artist.
to do with the Greater London area, its art collection casts its gaze far beyond the Roman
walls.
The show’s loose organising principle is a gradual zooming in on the material details of
London, rather than a conspectus of its architecture through time. It begins with broad
Views of London, those distant prospects, such as London from Greenwich Hill of the
1670s, Wren’s new-minted church spires bristling in the distance, the fifteenth-century
Palace of Placentia, converted by Cromwell into a biscuit factory, mouldering in the foreground, or the Prospect of the City from the North of around 1730, an intriguing view
towards St Paul’s with the New River buildings, including the windmill which survives as a
stump off Amwell Street, in the foreground. Then comes Changing Landscapes of London,
the sudden ruptures in the city’s fabric brought by fire and war, gradually tightening the
focus through Streets of London to home in on Close ups of London.
Many of the paintings are outsiders’ views, memories or postcards home of the striking and
unfamiliar. The Nigerian artist Uzo Egonu, who came to London in 1945, renders physical the
cultural context of his gaze in bold, curving views of Tower Bridge and Trafalgar Square, a
vortex of movement that draws on traditions of Igbo art. Anthony Lowe, a British artist resident in Germany, paints a memory of Blackfriars Bridge and St Paul’s, one that transforms the
stone dome of St Paul’s into a yellow metallic hat redolent of Munich’s copper roofs.
There are more suggestive and expressionist renderings of London, both familiar – a crustily dynamic Frank Auerbach of London rebuilding after the war – and less familiar – John
Virtue’s Landscape 715 of 2003–4, a few strokes of black paint evoking Chinese brush paintings to conjure St Paul’s from a dark cloud reminiscent of the iconic photos of the Blitz. But the
most sustained theme is of realism and for the architecture geek, it is a treat. The Second Duke
of Montagu’s house of 1731 (on the site of the Ministry of Defence) is rendered in meticulous
detail in Samuel Scott’s view from near Westminster Bridge, around 1749, an uncannily
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EXHIBITION REVIEW
similar approach to Ben Johnson in his 2011 view over Trafalgar Square towards that same
area of Whitehall in Looking Back to Richmond House. The domestic and suburban are
recorded with equal care in Clifford Charman’s melancholy Street of Shadows, Greenwich
of c.1977, and appear unexpectedly in a work by Lucian Freud, of the view of garages and
waste ground from his Paddington studio.
We are used to marvelling at images of the London we never knew – the crooked streets of
the timber-framed City purged in the Great Fire, or old London Bridge, that pulsating city-inminiature floating over the Thames. When we think of more recent transformations it is the
loss of the Victorian streetscape to the idealistic planners of the 1950s to 1970s, stock-brick
houses giving way to concrete blocks of social housing, to streets in the sky.
The London of David R. Thomas’s London from the Top of Shell Centre, 1968 is just as
radically different from the London of 2019 as it was from pre-Blitz London – the National
Theatre just a building site, the Oxo Tower the tallest structure on its section of the South
Bank; beyond, St Paul’s still dominates the City – no Cheese Grater, no Walkie Talkie (thankfully), not even the old NatWest Tower (Tower 42).
Another of Thomas’s paintings, A London Street Scene on the 34 Bus Route, 1965, shows a
similar moment of transformation - the uncluttered slab blocks and spidery airborne pedways
of London Wall contrast with a glimpse of the bomb site around St Giles Cripplegate. Yet the
scene depicted by David R. Thomas is barely recognisable today, not just St Giles, now
engulfed in the Barbican, but all the floating slab blocks rebuilt or replaced, London Wall
now crowded in, like medieval Cheapside, by a bulky assortment of City offices in every
flavour of architecture from the past 25 years.
Much of this is poignant from a conservation point of view. The most telling paintings are
those that record the loss of the recent past that many of us remember – modest unconsidered
buildings such as the Chestnut, a 1950s pub in Tulse Hill, captured by John Moore in a painting of 1970, now lost to a bland but necessary block of flats and a supermarket. David
Hepher’s Albany Flats, 1977–9, records Bradenham, a block on the Aylesbury estate in Southwark, its concrete textures coming alive on the canvas with sand mixed into the paint. Yet the
building itself is no more, demolished in the past few months for the estate’s regeneration, a
similar moment captured by Rachel Whiteread in her photographs of the demolition of the
Clapton Park estate towers in the mid-1990s, or Julian Perry’s heroically Constable-ish
little views over Hackney Marshes in 1995, since transformed by the Olympic Park. And
so the wheel turns.
Criticism has been levelled at this exhibition for its focus on the built not the social environment of London. Yet what are streets and buildings if not a social phenomenon … paid for,
built, looked at, lived in, worked in by people for all their human needs? Buildings and
their surroundings are a document of human activity, not inert piles of bricks and mortar.
The absence of people in the pictures (though many are peopled) does not diminish the pulsating humanity of London’s built environment. My one criticism would be that there is no
catalogue, but you can’t have everything.
Survey of London, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
AILEEN REID