The Kremlin comes to London
Anthony Mockler
One can really never be quite sure about that famous Russian sense of humour.
When they complain — as they have just done officially — that those splendid advertisements for the 'Wodka from Warrington' are causing actual harm to relations between our two countries, are they tucking their tongues firmly into their cheeks? And when M. Vladimir Semenov, number two at the Embassy, immediately after dispatching a letter to The Times — as he did last week — accusing both that journal and Sir Brandon Rhys-Williams, MP for Kensington, of being arrant liars, is then 'unavailable for further comment' because he has just departed permanently for Moscow, is that a sort of delayed April Fool's joke over which they are still chuckling heartily back there in the Kremlin? Try asking his erstwhile employer the Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Court of St James's, Nikolai Lunkov. And better luck to you in getting through to him than I have had.
M. Lunkov lives in rather a sumptuous mansion in Millionaires' Row — number 13 Kensington Palace Gardens, 'Harrington House,' a fine Gothic folly that the Russians acquired as their Embassy, despite residents' protests at such revolutionary infiltration in 1930. Since then almost the whole of the Row (bar number 12, where happily the Dowager Marchioness of Cholmondeley still resides) has been taken over by embassies — the Russians themselves having acquired number 16 for their actual Embassy, number 5 for their Consulate and number 10 for other purposes including Soviet 'official film distributors' — four vast mansions in a Row that has less than forty in all. In addition they have about eighteen large houses dotted all around Kensington — in Holland Park, Earl's Terrace, Rosary Gardens, Campden Villa Gardens and Addison Road. But now they want more and more — only all together. They want a conglomerate. They want to get it all together in a mini-Kremlin; they want to pull down a lot and put up a lot; and — according to Sir Brandon but not according to the far-travelling Semenov —they want to surround it with a vast sixty-foot wall. Hence the present fuss.
The trouble is that, though all the correct planning procedures are to be gone through, in the end the state (in the form of the Department of Environment pressurised by the Foreign Office) can override all local objections — as has happened recently in the case of the Ghana High Commission, one of the seventy-three embassies that the Royal Borough is, willy-nilly, forced to house. The Kensington Society, quite rightly, is up in arms and has called in Sir Brandon Rhys-Williams to help them in their fight — particularly against the wretched Foreign Office. The FO is in a difficult position because we have a splendid Embassy in Moscow, ochre-coloured and gold-leafed, a sugar baron's palace of roughly the same vintage, one centenary old, as Millionaires' Row. It stands just opposite the Kremlin, on an 'island' in the River Moskva — and the Russians want to make the island into a people's park and the palace into a people's museum and kick us out into the suburbs. The FO has been rather plaintively holding that our Embassy is too small — but of course the Moscow city authorities will only agree to a decent new site if the London city authorities do just what they want here.
And what do they want here? Well, first of all they are demanding two more man sions in Millionaires' Row — numbers 6 and 7. These really are splendid-looking neo-Palladian buildings — and they belong, like the rest, to the Crown Estate Agents who for years have kept them empty and allowed them to fall into a slight state of inner disrepair. The Russians propose, if their wish is granted, to knock down these mansions and build on the 2.7 acre site. Just opposite this site used to stand —we are now talking about the north end of the Row, abutting onto Notting Hill —three other fine buildings. Two of these three the Czechs knocked down — and on that site built a hideous concrete monstrosity topped bY what look like mini-cooling towers. Nun' bers 6 and 7 are of course, listed; the
Crown Estates revenues last year were about £12i million and their expenditure about £71 million. So they could perhaPs, instead of muttered subservience to the Soviets, have afforded a little refurbishment to their 'derelict' properties. But that is not all. The Soviet propertr developers also want what used to be Ken" sington Palace's kitchen gardens. In the mid-1850s a barracks for the Redcaps was erected there, a nice low ltalianate set of buildings fronting onto Kensington Church Street. The Russians want to pull it all down and insert a paddling pool, tennis courts, a tower block and, around it all here, the, famous sixty-foot wall — the existence 'al which is so disputed because no one (bar Sit Brandon and the Kensington and Chelsea Council planners, for half an hour) has seen the secret plans, over which the London KGB are apparently mounting guard night and day. And this is where all the huffing and pa' fing becomes slightly suspect. It hardlY behoves the local council to take too pi0us. an attitude over enclosures. And Mains` exactly on cue with these orchestrated Pr(' tests Bernard Sunley Investments have Put in last week a plan for redeveloping the site with 110,000 square feet of offices. Even the otherwise worthy Kensington SocietY now talks of this as a 'prime site'; and Sir Brandon has declared in the House that it is all becoming 'rather derelict through Planfling blight and is being used in unsatisfactory, temporary ways.' In fact the area, known as 'the Barracks is being extraordinarily well-used for Oil: tifarious activities. Most of it is a hoste" providing more homes, I should think, than!, ever Bernard Sunley's regulation 'fain' flats' will — and certainly for a more reasonable price. The hostel is officially for Stu: dents, but in fact also for a few old single people who would not find it easy to lodge elsewhere, as well as for more transient stil‘ dents. Deep inside there is, pace Sir Bran" don, an extremely satisfactory bicycle; renting business, a 'car-valeting' service,a, student's travel centre, the 'Venice in Perm offices and Lady Ranfurly's charity lihralli; 'Rather derelict', perhaps — but here .agaliv the Crown Estate Agents could posstb,:e afford a coat of paint and a little repalt"' out of that five million a year profit. The Soviet Embassy's proposals ad. monstrous and will no doubt be reject but, behind them, in the shadows, MI once again the rising spectre of the councut approved property developer, with all tha, insidious jargon beginning to ooze out nob; that the market is rising once more. T Sunleys, in the end, may be more sinistte because more surreptitious, than nl Semenovs.
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