the public outcry against Mr. Cotton’s plans to wreck the Piccadilly Site with a 170 ft. advertising hoardingcum-office block of monumental ugliness, has had some effect. The Minister has been obliged to reject the scheme: and the Report had some tart things to say about Mr. Cotton’s architect’s/architects’ (whichever it may be: for they have never to this day been identified) concept of pleasing architectural standards, and the ambiguous (to put it mildly) defence of comprehensive planning put forward by the LCC. However, lest we leap to the conclusion that the Conservatives are about to move sharply in the interest of the community at large against the excesses of private speculators and ugly prestige building, it is worth-while walking down from Piccadilly about 200 yards, to the South Bank.
Standing on the river bank between County Hall and the railway, you might imagine that we are already very near Orwell’s 1984. Across the river, Minipax in Whitehall is now completed. On the south side the others will soon be ready—Minitru over there behind the Festival Hall, and towering over us all Miniluv (the new Shell building); all 30 storeys of it. Orwell thought they would be shining white pyramids; the Shell architects have been neither so atavistic nor so futuristic. They have stuck to their happy medium: slabs and squares. As the handout, for example, described them:
The Shell offices will be characteristic in their expression of a British contemporary architecture. They will be faced throughout in Portland Stone to which James Bone in his “The London Perambulator” paid tribute in his dedication:—“To the isle of Portland, the matrix of London’s grandeur”. Reliance is placed on mass and fenestration, and the drama, new to London, of a block of tower-like dimensions. But, as the Portland Stone weathers, so will become more distinct the rhythmic patterns of cut lines in the stonework relieving the inevitable austerity of manywindowed walls.
The downstream building provides its own individual relief through the interest of the curvature of its main spine block, with its possibilities of delicate light and shade, and through the introduction of panels of grey-green slate in its framework of Portland Stone. The theme of this building is similar to that of the companion blocks upstream, but a theme with variations. For the downstream building has no dramatic contrasts of form such as are provided by the Upstream Tower.