A relief sculpture entitled Britain by Eric Aumonier looks down on the marble, rosewood and metallic surfaces in the entrance lobby.
DAILY EXPRESS BUILDING, FLEET STREET
The Daily Express Building at 120 Fleet Street caused a sensation at its opening in 1932 with its curvaceous black glass skin and its stunning Art Deco lobby. Fleet Street up until then had been lined with bland buildings resembling banks, and the Express building stood out marvellously. Sir Owen Williams was praised as the creator of the design, but the credit for the building should be shared. The design of the lobby was handled by another architect, Robert Atkinson, who had created several super-cinemas with lavish interiors, and here he emulated the style of the most extravagant skyscraper entrances of the time. A starburst ceiling is moulded into a lantern. Serpent handrails flank the approach to an oval stairwell. Rosewood veneers, smooth marbles and reflective metallic surfaces abound, bracketed by two relief murals.
A relief sculpture entitled Britain by Eric Aumonier looks down on the marble, rosewood and metallic surfaces in the entrance lobby.
Snake design handrails flanking the approach to the staircase were recreated for the restoration of the building.
Even some of the most high-minded architectural critics of the time liked the building, although the Modernist principle that interiors should be integral to the building does not seem to have been applied in this case. The building was not for architectural purists, although the public loved it. Insiders admired the structure by Sir Owen Williams, who was a civil engineer for years before he became an architect, and a specialist in concrete structures, spending much of the 1920s working as structural engineer on a succession of bridges.
His expertise solved a problem for Beaverbrook Associated Newspapers, who had started to extend its Fleet Street headquarters with a steel-framed design, but found the grid would be too intrusive, robbing them of space. Space was critical in the basement, where three huge presses were to be positioned. The engineering solution was to build a reinforced concrete eight-legged table straddling the basement with a mezzanine floor as the top. Over this, a series of single-span frames were stacked upwards. On the outside of the ribbed floors were mounted panels of black Vitrolite glass supplied by Pilkington, with clear window glazing hung between. The joints were covered by sills made of a newly developed alloy called Birmabright, which shined in sunlight. At night, the Express Building exuded activity, with the windows, divided by the alternate opaque layers, always brightly lit up. The black glass building set a house style for Express Newspapers, and very similar premises for the company followed in Glasgow and Manchester (which improved on 120 Fleet Street by surrounding the street-level print hall with glass).
A mystery remains over exactly who was inspired to apply the black glass to the structure. Some architectural historians have said it may not have been the bridge builder Sir Owen Williams, who disliked adornment and had said ‘architects do little more than decorate what the structural engineer has achieved’. His contemporaneous factory building for Boots at Nottingham has strictly functional glass. Robert Atkinson does not seem to have contributed to the exterior. The original architects for the steel frame design, Ellis & Clarke, had been retained, and may have contributed the Vitrolite panels, but their first submission had used Portland stone cladding.
Another possibility is that the Lord Beaverbrook himself exerted a strong personal influence on the finish, as the North American-born press baron craved a building of self-confident modernity to set it ahead of its staid rivals. In 1932 the Daily Express was just getting into its stride, soon to break the 4 million daily sales barrier to become the world’s best-selling newspaper. If anything, 120 Fleet Street is a monument to what was the greatest popular newspaper of its time.
Beaverbrook Associated Newspapers included the Sunday Express; the decorations below the deco sign are maple leaves, denoting the Canadian ancestry of the ownership.
What can be seen today in the building, which is occupied by Goldman Sachs, is much more than a restoration. Between 1998 and 2000 Hurley Robertson & Associates re-engineered and improved on what had existed in the later days of newspaper ownership. An extension called Aitken House had grown flush on the east side, which even when clad in Vitrolite was a clumsy addition. Aitken House was demolished without a murmur, and a smoothly curved pavilion added on the east side to make the building symmetrical for the first time. The building had stood empty for years after the newspaper left in 1989, and much had been lost in the way of fixtures, which had to be recreated, including the metal snake handrails.
The fabulous entrance lobby lives on, cleaned and upgraded as a tribute to Atkinson, much of whose other work has been demolished with the demise of cinemas. The plaster ceiling has been strengthened and the original wave patterned floor design recreated in terrazzo ceramics. Two stylized patriotic relief sculptures by Eric Aumonier depicting Britain and Empire continue to look down.
