WHITEHALL SOON TO BE RENEWED

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 368, 24 February 1937, Page 2

WHITEHALL SOON TO BE RENEWED

DEMOLITION OF HISTORIC POLITICAL BUILDINGS.

IMMENSE BLOCK OF GOVERNMENT OFFICES WILL HOUSE OVER FIVE THOUSAND CIVIL SERVANTS.

Edifices that have seen two or three centuries of political history are to be swept from Whitehall by the construction of an immense block of Government buildings, plans for which have recently been made public, says the “Daily Express.’ l ' Four Government Departments, employing 5300 civil servants, are to be housed in the whole block when it is completed in six years’ time.

Work is to begin early this year on

the first section, which is expected to be ready for the Air Ministry about five years from now. The first stage is to be the demolition of Whitehall Gardens. Their history begins with Pepys and comes down through Peel and his great enemy Disraeli to Lloyd George’s War Cabinet and the Committee of Imperial Defences.

Political Thoroughfare.

It is not clear from any plan or picture how much change the new structure it to make in the familiar vista of Whitehall. Whitehall is easily the most famous political thoroughfare in the world—a short, broad avenue of Government buildings with the House of Parliament at its foot and not far from its foot the famous little cul-de-sac called Downing Street. Although the affairs of a world-wide Empire are administered from Whitehall, there Is only one point at which Whitehall displays the pomp of power, and that, paradoxically, is supplied by the Household Cavalry regiments, which play no great role in Imperial affairs.

Horse Guards.

Ev ry tourist who has ever v'andered through the Houses of Parliament or Westminster Abbey has strapped on his way down Whitehall to join the little crowd in front of the two mounted Lite Guards on sentry duty outside the Horse Guards building. They are well worth stopping to watch, for more magnificent Household troops are not to be found in any royal capital. The rest of th street is characterised by a remarkable absence of plumed helmets and gleaming cuirasses.

Next to the Horse Guards there is a dark quadrangular building With a wireless aerial high above the cupolas on its root. Few of the thousands of tourists who pass it recognise it as the home of the British Admiralty, and fewer still ever glance up at its wireless. Yet that wireless controls the movements of the British Navy throughout the world and may thus appropriat'ly bo regarded as one of the nerve-centres of the Empire. Much the same might be said of the long range of the Treasury Building-, the "War Office, Scotland Yard, the Home Office, the Colonial Office, and round the corner in Downing Street the Foreign Office and India Office on opposite sides of the quadrangle, and that unassuming building, No. 10 Do ’.ling Street, the official residence of the Prime Minister. Tourists know the great palace of the House Of. Parliament and the plain white cenotaph with its drooping flags and banked flowers But

the rest of Whitehall is about as anonymous as it is possible for such a street to be.

Of Greater Height

The huge block of Government offices for which plans have now been announced is to attain a maximum height of 128 feet, higher than anything else which can be seen from Whitehall except ’he towers of the Houses of Parliament. It ”111 he set well back from the street in what is now Whitehall Gardens, and in fact its first section will rise behind the old banqueting hall which Inigo Jones built as part of a grand design which was to give James I. the great est Hoyal palace In Europe. The new block of offices will be half again as high at” the banqueting hall, which has already been a bit dwarfed by the big flamboyant War Office next to it.

The banqueting hall is all that was ever completed of Inigo Jones’ design. Charles I. stepped to his death on the scaffold through an opening in its wall, and civil war put an end to further building. The old Whitehall Palace, where Cromwell kept his Court and Charles 11. died, eventually burned down. Only the banqueting hall escaped, and that for the last 40 years has been a war museum. Having survived the fire of 1698, the old banqueting hall survives the building plans of to-day. But the little street behind it, known as Whitehall Gardens, is doomed. Its cite was originally part of the old Whitehall Palace. That palace had an elaborate private garden of some

three acres in extent, and in fact Whitehall Gardens was itself known until quite recent times as Privy Gardens—in name, at least, the same privy gardens as those which Pepys. visited.

Whitehall Gardens.

Whitehall Gardens has been built over for many years. A century ago it was a little street of fashionable Georgian residences, with spacious lawns running down to the river at the back. But its most interesting associations have been with politics rather than with fashion. Peel lived at No. 4, and it was at one of his solemn political dinners that Disraeli’s long association with Whitehall Gardens began. At No. 2 Disraeli lived as Prime Minister from 1874 to 1877, when he moved to 10 Downing Street, “to avoid my terrible, steep Whitehall stairs, which I cannot manage.” No. 2 has since become the home of the Committee of Imperial Defence, of which successive Prime Ministers have been chairmen. It was there that Lloyd George installed his War Cabinet, and there Sir Thomas Inskip, the present Defence Minister, presides to-day.

The Maw of the Giant,

But the oldest and best of the present Whitehall Gardens is Pembroke House, at No. 7, now occupied by the Ministry of Transport. It goes back to 1797, and much of its original plaster work and panelling, some of its chimney pieces and the fine wrought iron balustrade of the main staircase are still in it.

Everything in the little street is to be torn down in the years to come to make way for the new giant. But the demolition is to be carried out with due respect. The finest details of Pembroke House, its balustrade, chimney pieces, panelling, and plaster work are to be carefully preserved and incorporated in the new building. The wine cellars of the old Whitehall Palace are known to be still in existence underground, and their preservation has been provided for.