City and Suburban
By JOHN BETJEISiAN MAUNDY Thursday will be the lust day for having a meal in the Holborn Restaurant on the corner of Kingsway. It was more the sort of place to which Lupin Pooter would have gone than his father. It stood for go-ahead late-Victorian business and was designed by T. E. Collcutt, the architect of the Imperial Institute and the Palace Theatre. Inside it contains some of the most splendid and impressive rooms in the whole of London. Collcutt was no vulgarian like Archer and Green, who designed the Holborn Grill Room. His mouldings were scholarly, his colour schemes of contrasting marbles were carefully thought out—there are more coloured stones used inside the Holborn Restaurant than any building in London, not excepting Westminster Cathedral—his details were never scamped. What a pleasure it was, and still will be until Maundy Thursday, to walk, after a glass of port from the longest and most impressive list of ports in any public eating place, down passages where Edwardian electroliers were reflected in shining marble to explore that labyrinth of late-Victorian magnificence.
Full-Blooded One would walk up broad Turkey-carpeted stairs and see some splendid marble chimney piece, Flemish style, and open a door perhaps on the vast King's Hall laid for a Masonic banquet. The style was more reminiscent of Edwardian houses belonging to company promoters on Wimbledon Com- mon than the Italianate, gas-lit coffee rooms of station hotels, but it was equally full-blooded and convinced. There is no Victorian group nor Edwardian group to save the work of great 'architects like Collcutt and Norman Shaw. There is no record made of the Holborn Restaurant, and as far as I know this is the only printed protest against its destruction. Today we regret the disappearance of the works of Sir John Soane. I think that in fifty years from now we will be deeply regretting the destruction of this masterpiece by an architect whose individual manner is temporarily unfashionable.
Next For Demolition I make the excuse of Lent for continuing the list of our self-destruction. In London the Royal Opera Arcade is to go, with its long line of shallow domes and its Georgian shops behind Her Majesty's Theatre. One would have thought that modern architects, who are always talking about the wonders of building construction in new materials, could have incorpo- rated this arcade in their design without greatly interfering with whatever shape they have in mind. St. George's Church,. Tiverton, is to be destroyed. This seems hardly credible. It was built in 1714-30 and contains its original plaster-work ceilings, galleries and other fittings. Only the pews, pulpit and font are Victorian. W. G. Hoskins describes it as 'the only notable Georgian church in Devon.' Tiverton is the most attractive country town in Devon, with its mellow brick Georgian houses and its wide market place, the old buildings of Blundell's School, its almshouses and narrow passages giving vistas of lash elmy Devon hills, for the old town is gathered together on a view-commanding eminence. St. George's Church is the chief feature of the public streets of the town, not hidden away like the Parish Church. Without St. George's, Tiverton will look as lost as would Trafalgar Square without St. Martin's-in-the-Fields or Oxford High Street without the City Church.
Previous page
