On London's architecture of persistence — the buildings that survived, and what they mean to the people who work near them
London is a city that burns down and rebuilds and forgets to demolish what was there before. The result is a city where Georgian houses abut glass towers, and where the wall of a Roman fort is in the basement of a bank.
London is a city that burns down and rebuilds and forgets to demolish what was there before. The result is a city where Georgian houses abut glass towers, where the wall of a Roman fort is preserved behind glass in the basement of a modern bank, where the street pattern of the medieval city is still visible in the narrowness of the lanes off Cheapside despite the fire of 1666 and the bombs of 1940 and the developers of every decade since.
The persistence is not sentimental. Londoners are generally not sentimental about their buildings. The Victorian Broad Street station was demolished in 1986 without significant public protest. The Art Deco Firestone factory was razed in 1980 the day before it was to be listed for protection — deliberately, by the owners, to prevent the listing. The survival of what remains is largely accidental, the result of neglect, inconvenient ownership, or the particular bureaucratic slowness of the listing process.
What survives tends to be either very large or very small. The very large things — St Paul's, the Tower, the great Wren churches east of Ludgate Hill — survived because they were too expensive to replace and too symbolically loaded to remove. The very small things — the Georgian streets of Spitalfields, the Victorian shopfronts in the City, the almshouses of Stepney and Bethnal Green — survived because no one thought they were important enough to demolish first.
The Attendant café on Foley Street exists in a former Victorian public lavatory. This is the standard biography: a Victorian structure too inconvenient to destroy, eventually repurposed by people who found the inconvenience interesting. The porcelain fittings are still there because removing them would have cost more than leaving them. The ceiling is low because the Victorian engineers who built the ventilation system did not anticipate that anyone would want to drink coffee here.
This is what London keeps: the things that were too awkward to demolish and too useful to abandon. The city is full of these structures, and they constitute a kind of unplanned heritage that no preservation policy could have created intentionally — a record of the city's continuous, unmethodical revision of itself.