The relocated wine cellar, now under the Ministry of Defence.
In 1938 Queen Mary, widow of King George V, asked that the last remaining part of the ancient Whitehall Palace be kept from destruction; in fairy tale style courtiers accepted the challenge and granted the wish, overcoming great difficulties in the process. King Henry VIII’s wine cellar, as it has come to be known, is brick-ceilinged with supporting ribs, carried by four octagonal stone pillars dividing the room into bays. It measures 70 ft long and 30 ft wide, built in 1516 by Cardinal Wolsey and seized by Henry VIII.
By the end of the nineteenth century the houses on the site had been requisitioned by the civil service, which had developed a voracious appetite for office space. They were soon be overwhelmed by a huge development blandly known as ‘New Government Buildings’: a ten-storey colossus destined for a position on Horse Guards Avenue and Whitehall. Standing in the pathway of progress was the wine cellar, which was being used as a canteen for the Ministry of Transport.
Queen Mary’s request for preservation had come just before demolition work on the Georgian houses started. In December 1946 an extraordinary procedure was started to move the wine cellar to a new position. Dismantling had been studied, but the type of brick used in the cellar precluded that, and the solution was to excavate and build a steel carrying frame to the side of the wine cellar, fitted with rails. The complete cellar was then undermined, encased in concrete and mounted on a platform which enabled it to be moved sideways onto the carrying frame.
When the original site level had been lowered and a new concrete foundation laid, the wine cellar was lowered on screwjacks built into the frame and edged sideways back on a shorter journey, just nine feet less far to the east and nearly nineteen feet deeper than before.