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John Vane’s London Stories: When Charles went back to Camilla’s

The Belgravia flat where the future King and Queen Consort spent time 50 years ago will soon become part of the rubble of royal history
John Vane

Fifty years ago next month, in the small hours of the morning after a night on the town, a young man went back to the south London flat of a young woman. She was a confident 25, he, apparently, a rather shy 23, and whatever took place between them – only two people know for sure – it was part of the start of something that’s still going on today.

You will have seen the pair on television – even, perhaps, in real life – having a chat and shaking hands with people outside Buckingham Palace the other day. The monarch formerly known as Prince Charles, now 73, and the Queen Consort known at the time of that nocturnal encounter as Camilla Shand, now 75, had been getting up to whatever was going down at Annabel’s, a private members’ nightclub in Mayfair.

Located then at 44 Berkeley Square – it moved to Number 46 four years ago – Annabel’s was founded in 1963 by Mark Birley – full name Marcus Oswald Hornby Lecky Birley, since you ask – the son of royal portrait painter Sir Oswald Birley and brother of fashion model Maxime de la Falaise. Birley named the club after his wife Lady Annabel Vane-Tempest-Stewart (no relation), who would later give birth to Zac Goldsmith. If there were people in that world called Kevin or Sid, history has not recorded them.

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It has, though, recorded what has gone on between Charles and Camilla, including all manner of extra-marital carry-on before they tied the knot in 2005. Now that Charles has become King Charles III and Camilla looks set to remain his “non-negotiable” bride, it seems apt to take a look at the housing block to which they repaired back in 1972 before it is reduced to rubble.

Stack House is one of a quartet of seven-storey towers built in the early 1950s on a bomb site in Belgravia. They are clustered around a residents’ car park on a triangular site bounded by Ebury Street, Pimlico Road and Cundy Street, which also contains homes owned by Peabody and, within the Walden House block forming one of the triangle’s corners, Westminster City Council. The four towers are known collectively as the Cundy Street Flats, but won’t be there for much longer, as the builders’ boardings round them indicate.

The dwellings were nicknamed “aristo-flats” because they were full of toffs. Camilla Shand was one of them. According to the Daily Mail she rented her apartment from Lady Moyra Campbell, who had been a maid of honour at Elizabeth II’s coronation, and shared it with her friend Virginia Carrington, daughter of the then future Foreign Secretary Lord Peter Carrington.

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Charles’s visit to Stack House that night apparently wasn’t his first – he’d previously popped by to see another resident, Lucia Santa Cruz, daughter of the Chilean ambassador and a pal of Camilla. Neither was that night the first time he’d met Camilla, to whom it seems he’d already taken a shine. Even so, the forthcoming levelling of Stack House will erase one of London’s less official royal family landmarks.

Should the Cundy Street flats, which form part of the Duke of Westminster’s mighty estate, be knocked down at all? For some, the four blocks, with their curving balconies and other late art deco features, are heritage beauties which should be saved.

It isn’t going to happen. They, along with Walden House, are heading for the juicy footnotes of the royal history books and will be replaced by the all-new Cundy Street Quarter, featuring more homes, including more that are “affordable” and many specially designed for older people. Charles and Camilla are now of an age to qualify for such accommodation. That’s a nice romantic thought, but their housing needs are already met.

John Vane writes word sketches of London and bits about its post-war past. Sometimes he makes things up. Follow John on Twitter.

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Categories: Culture, John Vane's London Stories
Tags: Belgravia, Cundy Street, Ebury Street, Pimlico Road

Vic Keegan’s Lost London 237: The century-long wait for William III’s statue in St James’s Square

Whatever took it so long...?
Victor Keegan

St James’s Square, just north of Pall Mall, was built by Henry Jermyn, Earl of St Albans and the man credited with inventing the West End of London. In 1661 he had been given a lease by Charles II to build on what had previously been mostly open land. The square was constructed, unashamedly, to attract residents of quality – the nobility and gentry – likely to attend on the king. In the early 18th century, six dukes and seven earls lived there and, over time, 15 Prime Ministers, including three in the same house (not all at the same time). The east, north and west sides of the square contained some of the most desirable homes in London.

In the centre of the square today is a statue of King William III, Protestant hero and, from birth, Prince of Orange. He became king in 1689 after the overthrow of the Catholic James II in the so-called Glorious Revolution. It was unusual but unsurprising that the proposal to erect a statue in William’s honour in the square was made soon after, in 1697: unusual because he was still alive, unsurprising because many of his strongest supporters lived there. The official notice board tells us that it was not finally erected until 1808. Could that be a misprint? Could it possibly have taken 111 years to put up a statue?

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The answer is yes. Money, as usual, was part of the problem. William died in 1702 from pneumonia, which he contracted following a hunting accident. His horse apparently tripped over a mole-hill, a mishap depicted by the statue (bottom photo). But a series of attempts to fund a memorial failed. A solution seemed to have been found in 1724 when Samuel Travers MP left a bequest in his will for an equestrian statue “to the glorious memory of my master William the Third” to be built either in St James’s Square or in Cheapside. However, no one was able to agree about the details.

In 1728, an ornamental basin of water 150 feet in diameter was installed in the square, and in 1732 a pedestal followed – but still no statue. In 1739 one was apparently commissioned from Henry Cheere, his brother John Cheere, or maybe both. Made from lead, it depicted William on a horse which, for whatever reason, never managed to gallop to St James’s Square. It may to be the mounted likeness of William that today can be seen in Petersfield. Other statues of William can be found in Kingston-upon-Hull, Glasgow, Bristol, Portsmouth, Ireland (north and south), Amsterdam and in Kensington Palace, the latter an ill-timed present from Kaiser Wilhelm II, who went on to lead Germany against the allies in World War I.

Lamberts history and survey of London claims that during the Gordon Riots of 1780 the mob threw the keys of Newgate Prison into the water in the square, and that they weren’t found until several years later. Not until 1794 was a William statue for St James’s Square at last successfully commissioned. The task was given to distinguished sculptor John Bacon Senior, who inconveniently died before he could fulfil it. However, the statue was eventually completed by Bacon’s son, John Junior, using his father’s design and cast in bronze.

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Where the money came from is still a bit of a mystery. The antiquary John Timbs tells us it was not erected until 1808 because “the bequest in 1724 [presumably the Travers donation] for the cost having been forgotten, until the money was found in the list of unclaimed dividends”.

The statue, Grade I listed, still stands serenely among the plane trees (the basin of water is long gone). Bacon Senior was influenced by the equestrian statue of William in Bristol produced by the Flemish sculptor John Rysbrack, who also created Isaac Newton’s monument in Westminster Abbey. As in Rysbrack’s piece, the William in St James’s Square is portrayed as if he were a Roman general holding a baton in his right hand.

No one seems to know why Bacon’s work took so long to build. Perhaps there should be a special category for it in the Guinness Book of Records. It surely won’t mind waiting.

All previous instalments of Vic Keegan’s Lost London can be found here and a book containing many of them can be bought here. Follow Vic on Twitter.

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Categories: Lost London
Tags: Newgate prison, Pall Mall, St James's Square

Dave Hill: London traces of the late Elizabeth

The late Queen was long a part of London life, though in her own very particular way.
Dave Hill

Walking past a café near Victoria I heard a woman sitting outside it remark to her companion: “It’s strange, like there’s been this background music all this time and suddenly it’s not there.”

Well put. And those who’ve liked that music most were by this time turning up to help compose the British monarchy’s new tune, bustling out of the station towards Buckingham Palace, where early arrivals had already colonised the Queen Victoria Memorial, police officers were politely shooing people behind barriers because “the horses are coming”, and everyone had been made mildly damp by a moderate downpour. Brollies up. Chins up. The Queen is dead.

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Yes, it was terribly British, right down to the many foreigners present, although earlier, elsewhere in central London, there had been few outward signs of that “nation united in grief” we’re hearing so much about. By 10am Network Rail had got their message out at Liverpool Street station, as had Transport for London at the entrance to the Underground and, poignantly, the Elizabeth Line.

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On Charing Cross Road, the Outernet, another new feature of the capital had a large and impressive picture of the late monarch on display, and along Pall Mall a single black drape adorned a Reform Club balcony. When I walked past it again 15 minutes later there were two.

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That was about it for my travels before noon. Still, the palace end of The Mall was filling up, and it was there that an association between the late Elizabeth and the nation’s capital could be felt. It is a link that formed part of the London of my small town childhood imagination, thanks mostly to television. Although now a Londoner for over 40 years, I still find it exciting to inhabit that construction of the mind for real. And what was London like when Elizabeth ascended to the throne in 1953, before I was even born? Old film footage from an unknown source returns us flickeringly to fragments of that post-war past.

 

But where else in London can traces of Elizabeth be found? In Parliament. In Westminster Abbey. At Wembley Stadium. In 2012 at the Olympic Park, later renamed after her. Yet the London buildings where she spent her childhood have been erased.

She was born on 21 April 1926 at 17 Bruton Street, a townhouse just off Berkeley Square in Mayfair, which belonged to her Scottish grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore. It and neighbouring houses were knocked down shortly before the war, and today’s 17 Bruton Street is an uncommunicative office building adjoining Berkeley Square House. A plaque marks the spot of the infant Elizabeth’s residence.

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She later moved to 145 Piccadilly, a five-storey dwelling at the junction with Park Lane. In 1936 Elizabeth’s father became King George VI and the family moved into Buck House. It was just as well for them that they did because in 1940 the Piccadilly house was struck and badly damaged by German bombs. Today, the site is occupied by the InterContinental Hotel.

All of this gives a sense of the formal, ceremonial Elizabeth being very much of London, while at the same time traces of the early, more private one are intangible. Perhaps that is part of why Elizabeth II was so successfully enigmatic for so long, itself in integral aspect of her “soft power” and fascination for so many visitors to the capital.

No question, she put in a shift. And I’m quietly, mildly sad about her death: though I could do without the royalist grief performance and the wall-to-wall media output, the Queen has been part of the background music of my whole London life. Yes, it does feel strange that it has stopped.

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Categories: Culture
Tags: Bruton Street, Buckingham Palace, Liverpool Street, Mayfair, Pall Mall, Park Lane, Piccadilly, The Mall

Charles Wright: How well – or badly – is Sadiq Khan doing on housing?

As so often with this issue, a lot depends on priorities, definitions and forces beyond any Mayor's control
Charles Wright

The latest release of City Hall affordable housing statistics has prompted the usual political jousting: another “record-breaking” performance, or evidence of a disappointing lack of urgency on the part of the Mayor?

The figures for April to June of this year saw London Assembly Conservatives seizing on what they called a “pathetic” total of 764 affordable homes started with mayoral funding. “The housing crisis…has been almost completely ignored by Sadiq Khan. There is no sense of urgency,” said Assembly Member Tony Devenish.

Yet at the same time Sadiq Khan was trumpeting his 18,722 “starts” in the full 12 months to April as a record-breaking high since Greater London Authority records began in 2003, along with the construction of more new council homes getting underway than at any time since 1979.

What is the reality? If 764 homes started in three months looks low, it is important to recognise that those who actually build most of these homes, mainly housing associations and councils, work to annual targets agreed between City Hall and Whitehall, and their delivery is always “back-ended” and has been under successive Mayors. Last year the first quarter total was even lower, at 272 starts. Nine months later Khan’s record total for the year had been reached.

You can’t live in a “start”, though, as Khan’s opponents regularly point out. So how many homes have actually been finished for people to live in?

Under Johnson, getting on for 12,000 homes a year were completed over eight years. In Khan’s two terms to date the total is some 45,000, equating to not quite 7,500 a year. However, completions under Johnson fell from an annual average of 13,516 in his first term to 9,984 in his second. Khan’s numbers are going up, from 4,934 homes completed in his first year of office to 10, 252 last year.

The type of tenure matters too. Khan came into office with a pledge that affordable homes built under his policies would be “genuinely” so, and successful deal-making with Whitehall has seen a municipal housing boost, significantly upping the numbers of new homes available at social rent.

The government itself uses “starts” as its target because they directly reflect the Mayor’s ability to get money out of the door and spades in the ground, as opposed to reaping the rewards of their predecessor’s investment. By that measure, Khan seems to be succeeding.

Even so, it is still a race against time to get all the money spent. Khan has garnered £4.82 billion from the government to start 116,000 affordable homes by 2023, with a further £4 billion for 35,000 homes by 2026, and most of that is allocated. But some 24,000 homes need to be started to meet the 2023 deadline, with the second programme yet to get underway.

It’s a challenging target. The construction industry faces cost hikes as well as labour and skills shortages, and housebuilders are increasingly being outbid when seeking to secure scarce development sites by e-commerce warehouse developers.

Despite this, completions as well as starts are on an upward trajectory. Yet the positive trends are overshadowed by the increasingly grim overall housebuilding picture in London. The total number of new homes got underway in London in 2020/21, around 37,000, fell well short of the 52,000 a year City Hall target, never mind the estimated 66,000 new homes a year actually required to meet housing need in the capital.

London has the highest homelessness numbers in the country, with more than 60,000 households in temporary accommodation, including 76,000 children. A slump in private rental supply and asking rents up by more than 15% in the first quarter of 2022 are threatening to add to that total.

What is the answer? Partly, it is money. Current budgets may look large, but City Hall research suggests £4.9 billion a year is needed over the next ten years in order to meet this need. “The new government must work swiftly with the private sector to create new models for investment into affordable housing,” says the capital’s business grouping BusinessLDN.

The group highlights planning barriers too, particularly for City Hall plans to meet its targets through “densification” around transport hubs, often in outer London, as well as on the larger brownfield “opportunity” areas. This has triggered an ongoing “war of the suburbs”, with planning battles over Tube station car parks, former supermarket sites and even redundant gas works.

Might the new Prime Minister, embracing investment and building, sort this out? The signs aren’t encouraging. At the final hustings of the Tory leadership campaign, held at Wembley, outer London MP Iain Duncan Smith told party members that “top-down” housing targets were used by Labour councils “as an excuse to build tower blocks over low-rise family housing areas”, adding that Liz Truss had pledged to “help families living in our areas not to be dominated by tower blocks”.

And candidate Truss had clearly been listening to her London colleagues. “What I would do is abolish those targets in legislation. I would enable the London suburbs who want the family homes to build [them],” she said.

Those suburban wars look set to continue. Meanwhile, house prices and rents continue to rise.

Full statistics on City Hall-funded affordable housing starts and completions are available here.

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Categories: Analysis
Tags: housing, Liz Truss, London Assembly, Sadiq Khan, Tony Devenish

New conviction for man who has stalked London’s Victims’ Commissioner for 20 years

Claire Waxman says her case has underlined for her the inadequacy of current legislation and the lack of support for victims of crime
Dave Hill

London’s Victims’ Commissioner is to call on the government to reform the law against stalking after a man who has been subjecting her to it for nearly 20 years was convicted of three breaches of a lifetime restraining order.

Claire Waxman, who was appointed to her London post by Sadiq Khan in June 2017, said in a statement that her case has shown the current legislation, which she campaigned for, to be “flawed and not working for stalking victims” and has also reinforced her view that the government’s draft Victims’ Bill, as it is currently written,”will make no difference to victims navigating our delayed and broken justice system”.

She thanked the Metropolitan Police – in particular a now-retired officer, Daniel Candler – and the Crown Prosecution Service for their work, saying it is clear to her that the Met’s Stalking Threat Assessment Centre, commissioned by the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) and run in partnership with the National Probation Service and the Suzy Lamplugh Trust, is “making a positive difference to some victims”.

However, Waxman stressed that the Met must now “work hard to ensure that expertise and knowledge reaches the front line and can help all stalking victims in London”. She added that as a result of her case she is working with the Met to review its Witness Care Units, which, Waxman says, “have been struggling to meet victims’ needs”.

The offender, former television producer Elliot Fogel, received a restraining order in 2006 banning him from having any contact with Waxman, having been convicted the previous year of harassing her. But a court later heard that he began breaching the order within days and in 2010 this led to him being jailed for 16 weeks. He received a further prison sentence of three-and-a-half years in 2015 as a result of continuing infractions.

Waxman’s work for the Mayor focuses on providing victims of crime with a stronger voice in the criminal justice system, including women and girls subjected to violence. Khan invested £47 million in victims’ services in the capital over a three-year period, most of it provided by the Ministry of Justice and the rest from MOPAC’s budget.

Photograph of Claire Waxman from Greater London Authority.

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Categories: News
Tags: Claire Waxman, crime, Metropolitan Police, Sadiq Khan

Tunnelling work begins on new Silvertown road link under Thames

The scheme, which will connect Newham and North Greenwich, will be the first new road crossing east of Tower Bridge for 30 years
Dave Hill

Tunnelling work has begun on the new Silvertown road tunnel, which will link Newham and the Greenwich Peninsula to form the first new Thames road crossing east of Tower Bridge for over 30 years when it opens in 2025.

Early construction work on the twin-bore scheme, which will be 1.4 kilometres (0.86 miles) long, began in 2020 and the first of two two-lane tunnels is now being cut from the Newham side by a bespoke tunnelling machine named Jill in honour of Jill Viner, who in 1974 became the first woman to drive a London bus.

Transport for London says it will take “several months” for the machine to emerge on the Greenwich side, progressing at about ten metres a day, when it will be turned round to create the second bore, heading north.

The tunnel is being built by Riverlinx, consortium of five companies under contract to TfL, and will cost around £1.2 billion to construct and eventually around £2 billion over a 30 year period. A loan to pay for the project will be repaid by levying tolls on private motorists using the new tunnel, which TfL is describing as “public transport focussed” due to plans to start with a minimum of 20 buses an hour in each direction during peak travel hours.

The project has encountered strong opposition from environmental groups and from London politicians of all mainstream parties, but Sadiq Khan has continued to support it, arguing that it will relieve persistent congestion at the nearby Blackwall Tunnel, which is also to be tolled. TfL and City Hall maintain that the combination of tolling and extra capacity will prevent any overall growth in congestion and pollution.

Ideas for a Silvertown tunnel or “link” have been around since early this century, and different versions have had the support of previous Mayors Johnson and Livingstone.

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Categories: News
Tags: Silvertown Tunnel, transport, Transport for London

Legal challenge to Truman Brewery car park development plan fails

Campaigners had sought a judicial review of Tower Hamlets Council's planning approval, but were rejected on all grounds
Dave Hill

Conservationists have failed in their attempt to prevent offices and shops being built on a car park in a corner of the Old Truman Brewery complex on Brick Lane in Tower Hamlets.

The plans became a cause celebre for activists opposed to development in the area, who have variously claimed they will damage its historic character and force out Bengali Londoners through “gentrification”.

Permission for the scheme was granted by Tower Hamlets Council in September 2021 following lengthy negotiations with the site’s owners about the detail of the project, including the provision of affordable workspace for small businesses.

An application for a judicial review of the decision was made by the Spitalfields Historic Building Trust (SHBT) earlier this year, but a High Court planning judge has rejected it on all three grounds submitted.

The 64-page judgement, dated 31 August 2022, found that the council did not break its own rules over which councillors could vote at the key meeting, following the deferral of the decision at an earlier one.

The judgement also turned down claims that members of the public were wrongly prevented from speaking at the meeting, and that the council had wrongly failed to take into account the policies of the emerging Spitalfields Neighbourhood Plan. It is not yet known if the SHBT will seek to appeal against the judgement.

Tower Hamlets approved the scheme before the change of borough Mayor and council control that took took place at May’s borough elections. When campaigning, the new Mayor, Lutfur Rahman, responded to media coverage of the former brewery plans by pledging to “protect important cultural sites in our borough from predatory developers”.

However, the developers in this case have had ownership connections with the site since brewing ceased there around 30 years ago and have made no major structural changes to it, instead letting its various buildings, which stand on both sides of Brick Lane, to a variety of businesses including a nightclub, vintage fashion emporia, and art gallery, cafés, the European headquarters of Urban Outfitters and other firms needing office space.

In-depth coverage of the Old Truman Brewery story will be provided by On London soon.

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Categories: News
Tags: Brick Lane, Lutfur Rahman, Old Truman Brewery, Tower Hamlets Council

Jack Brown: History shows Liz Truss’s ‘investment zones’ won’t work without a lot of help from the state

If the new Conservative leader thinks Canary Wharf was built from unencumbered capitalism alone, a rude awakening awaits
Jack Brown

Liz Truss’s “bold plan to cut taxes and grow our economy” has yet to be laid out in depth, though we have the general thrust and expect more detail soon. But one aspect has been mentioned repeatedly. At last week’s final leadership hustings at Wembley, our next Prime Minister pledged to “set up low-tax investment zones to drive jobs and growth across our city, just like we did with the Docklands Development Corporation in the 1980s that has now created Canary Wharf”. Her recent Evening Standard article also highlighted Truss’s plans for such zones to “transform more of our country through the power of free enterprise” a la Docklands.

As a historian, I am a great believer in the past providing lessons for the present. There seems to be a mix-up about how Canary Wharf came about, and this is relevant to the Truss plan’s chances of success.

The “investment zones” she envisages setting up across the country seem to amount to extremely low-tax, low-regulation areas, much more akin to the enterprise zones of the 1980s (which were revived under the Coalition government) or to Rishi Sunak’s more recent “freeports” policy than to the London Docklands Development Corporation (LDDC). This distinction matters.

The LDDC was a quango established by environment secretary Michael Heseltine in 1981 to regenerate a once thriving part of the East End. The corporation’s job was to acquire, clean up and sell on land, put in new infrastructure, and market the area to developers. Market forces had seen the capital’s docks collapse into dereliction due to the advent of the shipping container, which favoured deep water ports. It wasn’t explicitly presented as such at the time, but the LDDC was established to spend a great deal of public money, time and effort on turning the area’s fortunes round.

Geoffrey Howe, the Chancellor of that time, favoured an alternative regeneration model he termed the  “enterprise zone”. Based on an idea of the Fabian academic Sir Peter Hall, these were to be localised experiments in deregulation, whereby normal planning rules and taxation were waived or relaxed to encourage development and enterprise.

To some degree, this was the opposite of the LDDC’s function. However, it is no coincidence that Canary Wharf emerged in a part of the Isle of Dogs where Heseltine’s development corporation and one of Howe’s enterprise zones overlapped. The LDDC cleaned up the land, put in the roads, cables and pipes, and generally primed the pump for the private sector. It also actively marketed the area, negotiating up the quality and purpose of development – despite the deregulated planning environment – in order to ensure its success. For its part, the Isle of Dogs enterprise zone incentivised private investment on a scale few had imagined.

The two initiatives helped each other, and it is impossible to ignore the degree to which the LDDC’s first chief executive, Reg Ward, worked alongside the scheme’s initial developer, G Ware Travelstead, to persuade, hoodwink and cajole the government into giving Travelstead all he thought was needed to enable the development to go ahead. Indeed, Ward went almost entirely native, and was moved on soon after Canary Wharf was signed off.

Despite his efforts, Travelstead was still ultimately unable to finance the project, and reluctantly handed it over to Canadian property giants Olympia & York. Then, with construction underway, O&Y went spectacularly bankrupt, leaving Canary Wharf half built and potentially redundant. The project eventually emerged from administration, but only after the government was forced to agree to both extend the Jubilee Line eastwards and build the Limehouse Link – pound-for-inch the most expensive piece of road in Europe at the time – in order to ensure its success.

As Canary Wharf rose from the docklands rubble, Margaret Thatcher became a prominent fan, but it was no straightforward triumph of Thatcherite economics and market forces. For better or worse, Canary Wharf would not have happened without a great deal of public investment and government intervention.

Elsewhere, operating without a powerful development corporation in the same area, enterprise zones seem mostly to have underperformed. They stimulate economic activity and create jobs, but there is concern that the tax incentives they provide simply encourage economic activity to move from one place to another, sometimes to locations that are less practical or efficient. And even when they work, they can do so at some expense: the Isle of Dogs enterprise zone was estimated to have cost the exchequer over £1 billion in foregone revenue in today’s money.

Enterprise zones certainly can have an effect, but my historian’s hunch is that simply removing regulations from patches of unused land is unlikely to be enough to make the next Canary Wharf happen.

Jack Brown is lecturer in London Studies at King’s College and author of The London Problem. Follow Jack on Twitter.

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Categories: Comment
Tags: Canary Wharf, Liz Truss, London Docklands Development Corporation, Michael Heseltine