DAVID TUCKER
Prisons and palaces and towers and moats and secret redoubts on a lost island … It sounds like something out of Edgar Allan Poe. It isn’t. It’s Westminster. But not that Westminster. Not the 30-million-tourists-a-year Westminster. We’ll give that – and them – a miss, thank you very much. So how do you find Secret Westminster? Sometimes it’s a case of knowing where to go. Sometimes it’s a case of knowing where to look. Sometimes it’s a case of just knowing.
HERALDRY IS ONE ‘way in’. A crowned portcullis is the symbol of Parliament. A portcullis is the symbol of the City of Westminster. The portcullis is everywhere in Westminster. The exterior of the Henry VII chapel is waffle-ironed with them. The new parliamentary office building is called Portcullis House. Its atrium features great wooden struts converging towards the middle of the ceiling. They’re engineered to open in the event of a fire, creating a chimney so the building won’t fill with smoke. Not to put too fine a point on it, the roof of Portcullis House is essentially a portcullis. You can’t get away from it here. The grille on the front of the Division Bell up on the wall behind the bar in St Stephen’s Tavern – the MPs’ ‘local’ – resembles a portcullis. You’re even carrying it around with you. Pull a few coins out of your pocket. Got a penny? Take a close look at its reverse side. It’s a portcullis.
A portcullis. Just what you’d expect on a lost island creaking with prisons and palaces and towers and moats and secret redoubts.
The island comes first. It supplies the genetic code. The sequence runs like this: Westminster was an island. Its secret places are islands. They’re the islands on the island in the island within the Isles. And since, as they say in Ireland, we don’t own the land, the land owns us, the mentality – the genius loci of Westminster – is insular.
We get the island from two rivers: the Thames and the Tyburn (Ty – burn: the two burns or two streams). The Tyburn came down through what is today St James’s Park and swabbled along about where Abbey Orchard Street turns Thamesward. (An orchard by a stream – merrily, verily, the names carry us far back.) And then it branched, the two forking arms of that stream creating our island, Thorney Isle. Thorney: covered with bramble bushes. Anticipating another element of the Westminster heraldic symbol: the rose.
Now, according to the mythos of Westminster, once upon a time (some 1,400 years ago) the Anglo-Saxons built a little church on the island. The night before the consecration a miracle occurred. There was a fisherman living on the island. He was awakened by voices calling to him from the far shore, the Lambeth shore. They wanted him to row over there because there was a ferry passenger. So he did. And so there was. Some ferry passenger: St Peter himself. So the fisherman rowed St Peter across the Thames and when St Peter set foot across the threshold of the little church it exploded into a supernova of light – as if with the light of a thousand candles!
WHERE TO READ THIS
St Stephen’s Tavern, across from the Houses of Parliament (it’s the MP’s ‘local’ – perfect for overhearing some political gossip). Or St Margaret’s, Westminster – the House of Commons ‘parish church’. Winston Churchill was married in this ancient church. Sir Walter Raleigh – well, most of Sir Walter Raleigh (from the neck down) – is buried here.
Westminster Abbey
And that’s essentially the creation myth for Westminster and the Abbey. The Abbey is where it is – and it’s called what it is (the formal name is the Collegiate Church of St Peter at Westminster) – because Edward the Confessor, who built the first Westminster Abbey in the mid-eleventh century, wanted to be buried where St Peter was supposed to have walked.
And the layers just kept being added. Much of the nave in today’s Abbey is mid-thirteenth century and the work of Henry III. He spent one tenth of the entire wealth of the kingdom on the Abbey. He stumped up £40,000 of his own money – this at a time when a labourer’s annual wage was £1. And the call he was answering? A burial place for himself. Similarly, the early-sixteenth-century Henry VII chapel – boasting the finest stone roof in the world – was to be a burial place for Henry VI. And, yes, why not push the envelope: Westminster Abbey is essentially an English pyramid.
Its tombs are inner sanctums. Or, if you prefer, last redoubts. Or even hatches. And the same goes for secret doors and hidden gardens. The oldest door in England, for example. It’s off the passageway leading to the Chapter House. Or the oldest garden in England, the Abbey Garden. It’s through a secret door and along a passage off the hidden of hiddens: the Little Cloister with its tiniest-of-tiny garden. Finding the Little Cloister is like following a treasure map to X marks the spot (though that’s true of much of Westminster). The sequence is: Great Cloister, Dark Cloister (the windowless bay along its south side is believed to have been a strongroom or prison), Little Cloister. You zig and you zag – the Dark Cloister especially is like walking through a tomb – and then there it is, just ahead of you … an emerald in a casket. The Little Cloister is, quite simply, a masterpiece. It’s a tiny chalice of light and green. An English oasis.
The Little Cloister is deep within the integuments of the Abbey complex. But Westminster’s most hidden ‘garden’ was the one on the roof of the Citadel. The ‘redoubt on the Mall’, it resembles a huge, vine-covered pillbox. A bomb-proof bunker, it was where the last stand would be made if the Nazis clanked into London. Its green crew cut – the lawn on its roof – was put there to fool the Luftwaffe.
And the most important garden? No question about it. The walled garden of 10 Downing Street. Much of the Balfour Declaration, which green-lighted the creation of modern Israel was hammered out in the War Cabinet meetings held in that garden in the summer of 1917. Historical pivots don’t come any more momentous – or far-reaching.1
And now the scene switches to the forecourt in front of the great twin-towered west front of the Abbey. Secret places aplenty here. Westminster Gatehouse, for example. The monument to ‘those of Westminster School fallen in the Crimean War’ marks the spot today. It was the seventeenth-century chokey of ‘stone walls do not a prison make’ fame. The lines were penned by Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier poet, when he was locked up here in 1642.
And glance over at the Clock Tower (the ‘Big Ben Tower’) of the Palace of Westminster. Sure enough, it’s got a lock-up as well – for refractory politicians. And for another one of the Clock Tower’s ‘secrets’ look at the slate-grey ‘dunce cap’ at its apex. Directly beneath it you can see five or six elliptically shaped, gilded windows. Inside the room they give on to is an extremely powerful lantern. When Parliament’s sitting at night the lantern is lit. You can see it from all over central London. That’s when those who know go to the Strangers’ Gallery in the Palace of Westminster to watch Parliament in action. The point being that there’s never a queue at night – you can always sail right in. Just look for that ‘on if by night’ light.
Closer to hand – it’s just over the way in Parliament Square – is Middlesex Guildhall. It always gets missed. It shouldn’t do. Pustulating with gargoyles and gaitered with a riot of relief sculptures, it’s both a visual peal of bells and a history lesson – some warm-up act for the new Supreme Court proceedings inside. And round behind it – and set into it – is the 1665 gateway from the old Bridewell Prison in Greencoat Row. The croaking old inscription reads like a death rattle: ‘for such as will beg and live idle’. The past doesn’t come much more austere and drear and cold. Rather that, though, than the fiery hell shadowing the present. It’s there to see as well, In the shape of what could pass for a round, stone picnic-table top in front of the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre. It isn’t. It’s a vent to a bomb shelter. But not a Second World War bomb shelter. A hydrogen-bomb shelter. (Not that it would have protected the scoundrels – the scurvy politicians – it was designed for.)
Any more? Sure. Right next to Portcullis House is the Norman Shaw Building (as it’s known today). It was New Scotland Yard – that is, Metropolitan Police Headquarters. A mordant touch: its ‘Dartmoor granite’ was quarried by convicts. And as for quarries – well let’s not forget what’s underfoot there. Which is by way of saying, even the new Underground station partakes of the Westminster mind’s walls! In Simon Bradley’s, er, lapidary phrase, ‘anyone who has ever pored over Piranesi’s prison engravings will shiver with recognition in this vast space, which reads as a kind of dark unconscious to the tightly controlled architecture above’.
And if you want to know what the torque of six centuries has done to Westminster’s underlying idiom of surly bonds, just saunter from Westminster station’s twenty-first-century Piranesian vision to the moated, fourteenth-century Jewel Tower. Noting, in passing, the line of stone sentries – the little towers – that fence in Parliament. The one on the corner – the ‘officer’ – is much taller. Beside it, like an aide-de-camp standing at attention, there’s a lamp standard. Atop it, like a golden diamond on a sceptre, is a four-sided lamp with the word ‘Taxi’ in sober black lettering across each of its amber panes of glass. It’s the House of Commons ‘taxi lamp’. When an MP wants a taxi the light comes on and flashes on and off. The firefly of Parliament Square, it’s very eye-catching, especially at night. Passing cabbies spot it and they know an MP wants a taxi. A delightful touch to the country’s political life.
Then there are Westminster’s hidden streets. One of these is Queen Anne’s Gate, arguably the finest Georgian street in London. And around the corner from it, Cockpit Steps – London’s most hidden ‘street’. Ninety years ago Queen Anne’s Gate was the home, in London, of men who bestrode the world like a colossus – the Great War titans First Sea Lord Jacky Fisher (‘Organizer of the Navy that won the Great War’ as the inscription on the footstone of his grave reads) and Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary and primus inter pares of the great and the good. Seeing their houses – they’re both blue-plaqued – domesticates them. And to domesticate them is to bring them – and their milieu – to life in a way that no cold, historical record on the printed page could possibly do. Because so little has changed, to come here is to walk into their world and their time.
Take 3 August 1914, for example. The cliff edge of the Great War. Standing there in his room at the Foreign Office, looking out the window at the gathering dusk in St James’s Park, Sir Edward famously remarked, ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe: we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.’ To stand in front of the Foreign Office today and look over at St James’s Park – yes, at dusk – and then stroll over to Queen Anne’s Gate, exactly where Grey will have walked that evening nearly a century ago, is to feel you have a very good chance of seeing him, just ahead of you. Up there, in the gloaming …
Gathering dusk. And gathering ghosts. In 1931 the War Graves Commission, in a bid to give people an idea of the scale of the losses in the Great War, reported that were the dead of the Empire to form up in Trafalgar Square and march down Whitehall, four abreast, it would take that ghostly column – that parade of death – three and a half days to pass the Cenotaph. There may be something else about that tableau. Something that in its own unwitting way is as stark – even perhaps as iconic – as Goya’s Disasters of War. It’s this. Looking out over St James’s Park, Sir Edward had already turned his back upon that will-it-ever-end? ‘death march’.
There’s more here. There’s always more. Just past the sandbagged entrance to the Cabinet War Rooms is the entrance to the Treasury. The first-floor window setts that run along there – from the Treasury entrance to the corner of the building – are necklaced with square patches of discoloration. The reason for them? They mark the holes that were drilled for the pegs for the steel anti-shrapnel shutters that were fitted to those windows. Steel anti-shrapnel shutters that protected the man who got this country – and indeed Western civilisation – through its darkest hour. In short, Winston Churchill spent most of the Second World War on the other side of those windows. No plaque there to tell you this; it’s another item in that catalogue that is Secret Westminster. That set of rooms was called the Annex. It was a first-floor flat in the Treasury that was specially created for Churchill. They didn’t want him in 10 Downing Street because it was a 250-year-old brick building, which wouldn’t have survived a direct hit from a bomb. The thick stone walls of the Treasury could take it.
Up close – Secret Westminster
Here’s a party trick for you. Put the following question to any Londoner: ‘You’re standing in Victoria Tower Gardens (just along from Parliament) – which side of the river, by the compass, are you on?’ The answer invariably will be, ‘Don’t be a fool, mate, you’re on the north side.’ Wrong. You’re on the west side. Every Londoner orients by the Thames, which basically flows west to east, bisecting London, but at this point the Thames has gone round a sharp bend and is flowing due north. Which means Victoria Tower Gardens is on the west side of the river. Ask that same Londoner where Docklands and One Canada Square (the tallest building in the UK) are and they’ll point in the direction in which the river is flowing. Whereupon you smile knowingly and say, ‘No, the next time you’re driving across Lambeth Bridge at night from this side of the river keep your eyes peeled; you’ll see it way in the distance, straight ahead of you.’ The disorientation is compliments of the bend in the river.
Smith Square, Lord North Street, Cowley Street, Barton Street
This is a congeries of magical ‘hidden streets’. The sensation you get when you find your way back into this little nest of perfectly preserved early-eighteenth-century streets is quite extraordinary. They’re a salient into the past. This is a London Field of Dreams – a build-it-they’ll-come neighbourhood. Except it’s already built. It’s very real. And they’re here already.
Lawrence of Arabia at No. 14 Barton Street, for example. He rewrote his masterpiece, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, in the attic room – ‘a haven of peace’ – under the eaves. And Lord Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, at 6 Cowley Street. And just over the way – at No. 16 – the greatest English actor of the twentieth century, Sir John Gielgud. Round the corner, at No. 2 Lord North Street, the Tory PM, Anthony Eden. At No. 4, Sir John Anderson – who came up with the idea and gave his name to the eponymous Anderson Shelter. (If you look closely you can see faded old ‘Public Bomb Shelter’ signs on several Lord North Street houses.) At No. 5, Sir Harold Wilson, the Labour PM. At the far end, No. 12, William Stead, the great campaigning journalist who went down with the Titanic. (His is the only house in the street that has a plaque.) Next door – No. 14 – Marilyn Monroe spent the night. It was the house of Binkie Beaumont, who ruled the West End of London for a generation. In other words, he was the most important theatrical impresario of his day. And that meant that anybody who was anybody in that world – Noël Coward, Laurence Olivier, Vivien Leigh, Richard Burton, Arthur Miller, etc. – sooner or later crossed that threshold.
And since this is a surprise-round-every-corner neighbourhood, by all means pop round to No. 8 Smith Square. It was the house of Sir Oswald Mosley – he who on precious little evidence believed he had one of the most powerful minds of the twentieth century. It was there that Mosley – great admirer that he was of Mussolini and Hitler – masterminded his cadres of Black Shirts, this country’s home-grown fascist movement.
Point counterpoint, because back round the corner – at No. 8 Lord North Street (the most important political salon on this country) – was where the anti-appeasement movement got started. It was the home of Brendan Bracken, the owner of the Financial Times, but more importantly, the ally, confidant, friend and lieutenant of Winston Churchill. Churchill and others of a like mind – such as Duff Cooper and Harold Macmillan – regularly met there, schemed there, trying to figure out how they could muster the support in the House of Commons to get Chamberlain out and Churchill in, so he could draw a line in the sand and say to the little Austrian guttersnipe in the Reichschancellory, ‘You cross that line, Herr Hitler, you’re at war with the British Empire.’
The 8 Lord North Street story doesn’t end there. Thirty years ago a group called the Conservative Philosophy Group regularly met in this house. They were addressed by luminaries from that end of the political spectrum, notably Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, but also the conservative economists Frederic Hayek and Milton Friedman. These weren’t idle chats. Those confabs laid down the intellectual foundations of Thatcherism.
Up until a few years ago 8 Lord North Street was the home of Jonathan Aitken, the prominent Conservative MP who was at the centre of one of the two biggest scandals to engulf the Tory party at the end of the twentieth century.
Parliament Square
Let’s end by heading back out to the ‘public face’ of Westminster. If you stand by the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square and look in the general direction in which he’s looking, you’re looking at the spot where the second of the two most important moments in the twentieth century occurred. You’re looking across at the Prime Minister’s House of Commons office. It was there late on the afternoon of 28 May 1940 that Churchill addressed a full cabinet meeting – a cabinet meeting of frightened, demoralised British politicians.
Some context. The British army – 340,000 men – was trapped at Dunkirk. The panzers were just ten miles away. The evacuation had just started the day before. They’d only got 10,000 off that first day. They thought if they were lucky they’d get 100,000 off. In the event, the miracle occurred. Well, two miracles. For some reason Hitler didn’t pull the trigger and send the panzers those last few miles to those beaches. And the cloud cover came in, so the Luftwaffe couldn’t deliver the coup de grâce. The flotilla of little vessels – one of them to this day is sometimes anchored right there in the Thames – got almost all of that army off – 334,000 of them. But on 28 May that happy outcome was in the future, undreamed of, unhoped for. Nor did Churchill pull his punches. He told his colleagues exactly how things stood. He said, ‘We could all be dead in a few months.’ And then this: ‘If our long island story must finally end, let it end only when the last one of us is lying on the ground, choking on his own blood – rather than surrender to that man.’ And closed it thus: ‘Whatever happens at Dunkirk, we shall fight on.’ And that was the turning point. As one, those frightened, demoralised politicians leaped to their feet, cheering. The war was not Churchill’s to win – that would require the entrance of the Americans – but it was his not to lose. He did that then. Did it just over there – where you’re looking.
The next time you look at a newspaper hoarding in London, perhaps spare a thought for the hoardings that went up all over London just a couple of weeks later, on the day the French surrendered. The hoarding read: ‘French Surrender – We’re in the Finals’. The insouciance of that is very British – but that flame couldn’t have been lit had it not been for Churchill’s ‘mobilising the English language and sending it into battle’ (in the words of the great American reporter, Edward R Murrow) the way he did in that modest little room off the Commons on that fateful day in May 1940.
1. The three most important ‘turning points’ in the twentieth century took place in London, two of them here in Westminster. You’ll read about the second Westminster ‘historical pivot’ later in this chapter. The third one was in Bloomsbury on 12 September 1933 when Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard conceived the idea of the nuclear chain reaction that made possible the atomic bomb.