“Maltese gangsters with guns used to shoot each other at lunchtime.”
Edward Jones is recalling the Soho of his past with his longtime associate Christopher Woodward. Woodward remembers “the first cappuccino machine in Soho, and the first tables on the pavement in Percy Street”, where Jones lived in the Architectural Association school of architecture residences.
We had met at the Air Street development, the former Regent Palace Hotel designed by Henry Tanner in 1914 in a tile-clad Edwardian baroque style that sits just on the border between Soho and Regent Street, to discuss the changing nature of the city that, of all people, they know particularly well.
After all, there are many guides to the architecture of London, but there is only one Guide to the Architecture of London. Since its first publication in 1983, Woodward and Jones’s regularly updated book has become utterly definitive, superseding dozens of other instantly forgotten gazetteers.
While most guides reflect the prejudices of their time, this particular guide has had higher ambitions – to straightforwardly explain not just London’s buildings, but its development over the centuries. Endorsements of the book have even come from those architects, like Richard Rogers, whose work is given very sceptical assessments therein. Unlike more personal guides to the city’s buildings – such as Nairn’s London, from 1966 – the Guide focuses on contemporary London’s emergence through logical planning and municipal action, rather than as a series of “villages” accidentally coalescing into a metropolis.
Just as London is changing, so is their book. Its latest – and apparently, last – incarnation is an app, the London Architecture Guide, developed with the Architecture Foundation. Soho seems the perfect place to take the app on an exploratory jaunt – partly because of Jones’s work here (he had worked on the Regent Palace Hotel’s transformation into Quadrant 3, a mixed-use apartment and retail complex, as co-director of the firm Dixon Jones), but also because it was one of the first neighbourhoods in London to be treated like a continental capital, used for strolling and promenading and other formerly un-English forms of urbane enjoyment.
The app divides London into even squares – an abstracting gesture in this messy metropolis. The authors insist this was necessary: in their eyes, the conventional division of London into villages and districts is “just marketing”. The guide was originally commissioned as a guide to modern London, but when they insisted that “modern London” began in the 18th century with the classical laying out of the Great Estates, they were given permission to take on the city’s entire history. A classical, rationalist, progressive philosophy runs through the book, deeply suspicious of Victorian gothic – let alone the likes of Zaha Hadid.
The app brings up a map that you can enlarge, with pins for specific buildings and appended photographs. It reflects the overwhelming dominance of north London in the print edition, but also allows sorting by date and typology, along with pop-ups of Jones and Woodward’s razor-sharp descriptions.
At Air Street, the app first highlights the County Fire Office by Sir Reginald Blomfield, then suggests nearby works by the same architect as the Regents Palace Hotel, Henry Tanner (who also designed the grand Edwardian frontages of Oxford Circus).
But it can also organise London chronologically, so we ask it to take us to the oldest parts of Soho, when this neighbourhood was laid out in the 17th century as a grid around two squares, Golden Square and Soho Square.
Along the way, we look out for some of Georgian Soho; the app directs us instead to Fribourg’s, a well-preserved shop front in Haymarket. Ignoring that, we try to seek out the piquant classical church of St Anne’s, with its elaborate anti-dogging fences, but are surprised to find it is actually in the 1800-1900 section. I had assumed the app was broken. “It is rather slow,” warns Woodward.
On Brewer Street, he is surprised that the modern car park (which does not make an appearance in either Guide or App) survives, and has not “had its value released”. On Old Compton Street, he notes the increasing absence of porn shops and gay bars, but then asserts that “none of this is to be particularly regretted, because of the internet”.
At last we reach Soho Square, home to St Patrick’s Church, with its tall redbrick tower. After that, we ask the app to take us “post-2000”. It directs us to Broadwick House, built by Richard Rogers in 2002. Neither Woodward nor Jones is especially impressed by the building today, and are more sympathetic to the council tower block behind it. Woodward blames Rogers (“and Tony Blair”) for the Caffè Nero on Old Compton Street, and notes that Broadwick House has “one of those wavy roofs” that are no longer fashionable. Soho was the birthplace of this would-be continental aesthetic, with the mixture of the sex industry, pop and media, and an established Italian community. Woodward recalls the New Left Review’s old cafe Partisan: says, “It has plywood furniture – that was its appeal.”
Circling back to Quadrant 3, Jones points to the flats at the sharp corner of the block. “Al Gore lives there, which we’re very pleased about.” They discuss how the Conservative administration of Westminster council has managed to preserve the fabric of the area far better than the City of London, under the planning rule of “that charlatan Peter Rees”. However, they are sad that conservation coexists with a reactionary approach to the sort of alternative lifestyles Soho has been built on since the 50s.
Both Woodward and Jones are “lifelong Labour voters – except for a while after the Iraq war”, says Woodward – and neither are sympathetic to the way London is developing. The most recent edition of the guide is full of scorn towards the overdevelopment of the last 15 years, particularly the transformation of the Thames into the backdrop for endless luxury flats.
Compared to the skyscraping free-for-all in the City or the inner suburbs, Westminster’s commitment to order seems preferable, but it also crushes other aspects of the city they appreciate – such as diversity, equality or the tiny handful of what Woodward calls “places you can buy useful things” in Soho.
In many ways, Quadrant 3 and its surroundings are an example of this very process – a formerly messy area of small cafes and sex shops, now smoothed out into high-end chains and cleaned-up streets. In the building’s defence, Jones points to the cheap £10 dinners of the Zédel restaurant downstairs, with their art deco interiors by Oliver Bernard and restored by Donald Insall.
Does the app match up to the print edition? Its authors are uncertain. “The immediacy of the app gives a journalist’s view,” rather than a historian’s one, says Jones. The guide has always had the ambition to be a first draft of history, not just a guide to fashion. And yet the more classical modern architecture that has become popular in London in the last five years leaves them a little nonplussed: both are aghast at Demetri Porphyrios’s neo-deco office block in King’s Cross, and puzzled by the stark “cold war retro” of the Olympic Village.
The two have no intention of producing another print edition of the guide – they found the 2013 update exhausting – so new buildings are being added to the app instead, including 20 that weren’t in the last guide. As we try to find one of these in Soho, Woodward declares that the app includes O’Donnell and Tuomey’s Photographers’ Gallery, complete in 2014. Jones demurs. “I wrote the entry, but you wouldn’t photograph it because you didn’t think it was good enough!” True enough, we can’t find it in the app. It remains very much an idiosyncratic affair. “I don’t want to turn this into a crowdsourcing operation,” Woodward says. “We want to keep editorial control.”
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