If you like Brutalist architecture, and I don’t, an excellent example of it is the U.K. Ministry of Justice Building in London. It’s located near Buckingham Palace, where the streets of Petty France and Broadway converge. I’ve passed the building dozens if not hundreds of times, on my way to and from the St. James’s Park tube station. It’s right around the corner from where we stay when we visit London.
The complex was designed by Sir Basil Spence, a celebrated architect associated with the Modernist / Brutalist style (some call it the Soviet style). In fact, Spence had a plan to replace most of the government buildings in Whitehall with buildings like this one. Fortunately, the plan never became reality, except for this building which at its top resembles Darth Vader. At least Darth Vader had a personality.
On a recent visit to London, I signed up for a walking tour of the Petty France area, offered by London Open House. It’s a rather neat program offered each September, with hundreds of places to visit or numerous walking tours you can take, all focused on architecture. The Petty France tour was right near our hotel, so I thought, why not?
The thing about London is that it’s been built, destroyed, rebuilt, attacked, burned, bombed, and rebuilt yet again for the past 2,000 years. Wherever you go, you see what’s there, and you also know you’re walking upon the ghosts of history. A lot of ghosts, and a lot of history.
After several stops and chats, including one in front of our hotel which the guide explained had started out as a block of mansions, or flats, we turned on to Petty France. The street got its name in medieval times. It was the center of the wool trade, and because so much English wool went to the continent, it passed through the hands of the French wool merchants, who lived in this area. The name was changed during the French Revolution (when anything French was suspect in Britain) to the Duke of York Street, and then it was changed back to the Petty France in the World War I period, because France was now an ally and there were just too many Duke of York streets in England for the postal office to keep track of.
We passed the Wellington Guards Barracks, and then we stopped at the corner of the Justice Ministry building pictured at the top.
If you wanted to design something that looked nondescript, anonymous, and vaguely threatening, this corner is it. It’s difficult to imagine anything historical ever happening here; Sir Basil’s brutalist building shuts the imagination down hard. And yet this spot is one of the most significant spots in the history of English literature.
The only hint is the pub diagonally across the street. It’s called the “Adam and Eve,” and on weeknights and especially Fridays after work, patrons spill out onto the sidewalk and even into the street, chatting and drinking their pints.
Our tour guide pointed to the pub and asked if any of us could guess where we were standing. None of the 30 people on the tour had a clue, so he told us.
In a house that occupied this personality-less spot, between 1652 and 1658, the poet John Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Actually, he dictated it, a necessity because of his blindness. He referred to this house as “a pretty little garden house;” Vic Keegan’s Lost London has a nice illustration of what the house looked like superimposed on the photograph of the Ministry of Justice building.
History abounds in this part of Westminster. Around the corner from the Justice building is a home built by John D. Rockefeller. The Queen Anne architectural style began here. The collection that eventually became the British Museum started in a house here. The model for M in the James Bond stories lived here, and he actually had a tunnel connecting his house on Queen Anne’s Gate to the Special Operations Building on Broadway. The Cockpit Stairs leads down from Queen Anne’s Gate to connect to Birdcage Walk, and, yes, it’s named for the cock fighting that went on in the 17th century. The printer William Caxton has his presses here for a time.
But it was that spot where Milton’s house had stood that stayed with me. The house had likely disappeared long before Basil Spence arrived with his concrete. But here, on this spot I’ve passed so many times, a blind poet composed one of the greatest poems in English literature.
