Ashentree Court and Northcliffe House

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newspapers

Once upon a time, the Whitefriar monks walked the – presumably – shady courtyard in the centre of the Whitefriar monastery site. Judging by the name, the trees planted in the court were ashes, but that is just an assumption. In 1708, Edward Hatton called the Ashentree Court “a pleasant Court on the E. side of White Friars, about the middle”.⁽¹⁾ Apparently, houses had been built in the court after the monks had left, as in 1763, three “old houses” are reported to have fallen down, killing a boy.⁽²⁾

These days, there is not a tree or house in sight, but plenty of shade from all the office buildings around the court. Ashentree Court can be found off Whitefriars Street leading to Magpie Alley which runs to Bouverie Street. The section of the Google Map below shows where the tiles depicting the history of the association of Fleet Street with printing can be found (green line), where the Whitefriars Crypt is (red cross), and where the panels that are the subject of this post (blue line) are.

The metal panels in Ashentree Court depict the history of the newspaper presses at Northcliffe House, situated on the corner of Whitefriars and Tudor Street, just south of Ashentree Court. I apologise for the quality of the photographs; my camera is only a small one and the panels were rather dirty, combined with the poor light conditions … well, what can I say. At least it will give you some idea of what there is to see. More and better photos – with transcriptions of the panels – can be found on Ian’s blog.

The plates not only show the working of the printing presses inside the building, but also the building of Northcliffe House itself in the 1920s. Harold Harmsworth (Viscount Rothermere), the then owner of the Associated Newspapers, had Northcliffe House built and named after his brother Alfred Harmsworth who had become Lord Northcliffe in 1904 and who had started his career as the owner of the Evening News, later also founding the Daily Mail with his brother. Alfred died in 1922. The Times of 20 January 1927 reports on a General Meeting of the Associated Newspapers Ltd. in which the chairman reported the following on the building progress,

As the directors explained in the last annual report, unexpected delays were met with in the construction of the new building […] which, with its new devices and new inventions, will provide the Daily Mail and Weekly Dispatch with the last word in equipment for newspaper production. However, I am glad to be able to say now that the rate of progress has been such that it is hoped to make a start with the printing of part of the Weekly Dispatch at Northcliffe House within the next few weeks. You will be glad to hear also that the greater part of this magnificent building with it wonderful up-to-date machinery had already been paid for out of profits. (hear, hear).

Northcliffe House was designed by Ellis and Clarke, the architects who were a few years later also to design the Daily Express building in Fleet Street. Northcliffe House has been a Grade II listed building since 1988 and the description on the English Heritage site says,

Stone clad steel framed structure. Roof not visible. 4 storeys. Plus attic storey. 7 bays to Tudor Street and 6 bays to Whitefriars St.Corner entrance, square headed, with prominent keystone. First, second and third floors unified by giant order Ionic pilasters with lion head masks to capitals. Almost fully glazed between,the first and second floors linked by continuous mullions to long 3-light windows; metal glazing bars in margin glazing pattern, sub-divided into very small panes. Fluted coved cornice of neo-Egyptian character above third floor. Recessed attic storey. Short polygonal corner tower.⁽³⁾

The Associated Newspapers moved to Kensington High Street in 1989 while the actual printing was by then done at their plant at Surrey Docks, but Northcliffe House, although no longer in use for publishing newspapers, remained as yet another reminder of the newspaper history of the Fleet Street area.⁴ The façade of the building, because of its Grade II listed status, had to be retained when the site was redeveloped in 1999-2001 and still shows the Egyptian-style and lion head details.

You may also like to read the posts on the Daily Express building, the Whitefriars Crypt or on Magpie Alley.

(1) Edward Hatton, A New View of London, Or: An Ample Account of that City(1708) p. 3.
(2) “The Monthly Chronologer” in The London Magazine, Or: Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer, volume 32 (1763), p. 275.
(3) English Heritage.
(4) Hugh Pearman, “The New Fleet Street”, Sunday Times, 2 July 1989; and Brian MacArthur, “Fleet Street’s last farewell”, Sunday Times, 6 Aug. 1989.

Brendan Bracken, minister of (dis)information

Tags

newspapers, politics

As a follow-up on the previous post on Bracken House, this week a post on the man these newspaper offices were named after. Brendan Bracken liked to make a mystery out of himself. When still young, he described himself as an Australian orphan, and although he had lived in Australia for a while, he was not born there, nor was he an orphan. He was also alleged to be the illegitimate son of Winston Churchill. The rumour probably did not originate from his vivid imagination, but he made no effort to deny it either. His private papers were on his orders destroyed within twenty four hours of his death, which certainly did not make life easy for his biographer, Andrew Boyle, who described the writing of ’Poor, Dear Brendan’. The Quest for Brendan Bracken as a work of detection.

Bracken was born 15 February, 1901 at Templemore, Ireland. Already when very young, he told colourful tales and preferred to play truant rather than go to school. After his father’s death, his mother moved the family to Dublin, but Brendan kept up his truancy antics and in 1915, his mother placed him with the Jesuits at Mungret in the hope that they could teach him some discipline. Unsurprisingly, the school did not agree with him and he ran away. He seemed to have toured through Ireland, leaving a paper trail of unpaid hotel bills. His mother was not unduly worried until the bills stopped coming. She found him in Limerick, claiming to be a trainee journalist. She was having none of that and whisked him off to Dublin where it was decided to send him to Australia. As can be expected by now, Brendan did not exactly behave as the dutiful son should and instead of staying to finish his education in Sydney, he managed to arrange a far freer existence at the sheep farm of a distant relative of his mother’s. He used the library at the convent at Echuca to educate himself in his spare time in the subjects he thought worthwhile. He supplemented his pocket money with some private teaching, pretending to be a fully qualified teacher.

But Australia was not his dream country and in 1920 he was back in Ireland, but not for long. His mother had remarried and had no intention of listening to his tall tales while footing all the bills. Brendan went to England. He somehow managed to get himself into Sedbergh School in Cumbria, pretending to be a 15-year old Australian orphan. Although the headmaster probably never fully believed him, he was admitted, but only stayed for a couple of months. When he left Sedbergh, he had every intention of trying to make a living teaching, but after just two years switched to politics and journalism. He managed to get himself introduced to Oliver Locker-Lampson who engaged Brendan to promote a new magazine, the Empire Review. In 1923, he met his hero Winston Churchill and involved himself in the latter’s – unsuccessful – attempt to become the MP for Leicester West. One thing led to another and Brendan managed to succeed in both his publishing efforts (among others The Financial Times) as well as in his political life.

Brendan Bracken (Source: borrisoleigh.ie)

His easy chameleon-like behaviour, appearing exactly what he thought others would like him to be, combined with his charm and – not always truthful – account of himself, brought him into contact with many people who could and would further his career. He became friends with Lord Beaverbrook, of Daily Express fame⁽¹⁾, and at the beginning of WWII, Winston Churchill asked him to become his Parliamentary Private Secretary. In July 1941, Bracken was appointed Minister of Information, and although at first reluctant to accept a post where three of his predecessors had failed miserably, he overhauled the Ministry drastically the first week in office, clearing it of all ”bureaucratic deadwood” and reasserting the rights of ‘his’ ministry in handling official propaganda. He had a knack of appointing the right people and could therefore leave the actual day-to-day running of the ministry to others. According to Lord Chandos, “he threaded his way with great skill through the labyrinth of public relations and avoided the pitfalls and sands. […] He ran the policy with a firm hand and left the details to others”⁽²⁾

After the war, Labour won the elections and Bracken was suddenly without a political job, but he quickly filled the gap by engineering a merger of The Financial News and The Financial Times. He became the chairman of the ‘new’ Financial Times which was at that time based in several separate buildings in the City; only after his death would they move to Bracken House. Lord Poole, his successor as chairman at the FT, said in a statement circulated with the accounts for the period June 1957-December 1958, “Bracken was a man of brilliant and varied parts […] under his inspiration the paper was broadened from a journal of primarily financial and economic interest to the lively, vigorous newspaper we have today”.⁽³⁾ Bracken died on 8 August 1958, aged 57 and, according to his wishes, there was no funeral service, no memorial service and all his papers were burnt in the fireplace of 8 Lord North Street, his London home.

8 Lord North Street

Look up to the top floor of the house and note the bricked-up window. I read somewhere that Bracken swapped that part of the house with the neighbour for a bit of the garden, but whether that is true …? In November 2007, an application was submitted for approval to renew the marquette paving, because cracks had appeared in the front entrance steps of number 8. On the photos supplied with the application, the cracks can clearly be seen.

cracked step

restored step 2013

Another application of more interest perhaps, was submitted two years earlier by English Heritage to Westminster City Council for a blue plaque. The application was received in September 2005 and the favourable decision notice was issued on 12 October. The submitted plan included a drawing of the plaque design.⁽⁴⁾ As you can see, it was to be a standard English Heritage blue plaque. I have contacted them to ask whether the plaque is indeed on the shortlist that they mention on their website and if so, whether any concrete steps have been taken about the plaque. Will keep you posted on this.

design blue plaque

UPDATE 21 Oct. 2013: the good people at English Heritage have already sent a reply to my query about the blue plaque and this is the situation: although they have permission from the council to put up the plaque, the owner of the property refuses permission, so all EH can do is check on a yearly basis whether the situation has changed. Some people … honestly … no sense of history. Let’s hope they change their mind or that ownership of the house changes and we will see a blue plaque at 8 Lord North Street. In the mean time, the drawing above will have to do.

Most of the information on Bracken’s life comes from Andrew Boyle, ’Poor, Dear Brendan’. The Quest for Brendan Bracken (1974)

(1) See: My Dear Max: The Letters of Brendan Bracken to Lord Beaverbrook 1925-1958, ed. R. Cockett (1990).
(2) Boyle, p. 294.
(3) The Financial Times, 24 June 1959.
(4) The application can be seen here

Bracken house

Tags

newspapers

Bracken House was built in the second half of the 1950s to house the Financial Times and named after Brendan Bracken (1901-1958), the former chairman of the paper. The building was designed by Bracken’s friend Sir Albert Richardson (1880-1964) who deliberately made use of pink brick and Hollington sandstone to reflect the colour of the newspaper. The design was “a curious mixture of Italian Renaissance and Swedish twentieth-century neo-classical elements”.⁽¹⁾ It consisted of two separate elevations, one on Cannon Street and one on Queen Victoria Street with the utilitarian printing works in between. Because the site was not exactly rectangular or square and because Distaff Lane and Friday Street on either side of the building slope down towards the river, not to mention the existence of St. Nicholas Cole Abbey in the southwest corner, the two elevations do not align properly and the 24 floor levels inside were ‘complicated’ to say the least.

In 1984, Pearson plc, the parent company of the Financial Times, acquired the freehold of the site from the Corporation of London. That was also the time when the big newspapers one by one moved east to London’s Docklands as the Financial Times was to do. Pearson looked at possibilities of redeveloping the whole inner city site and put out an informal design competition in 1986 which was won by Michael Hopkins and Partners. In 1987, it was decided to sell the freehold to Obayashi (also referred to as Ohbayashi in the newspapers at that time). The new owners agreed to use the winning design firm as their architects. In August 1987, the old building received a Grade II* listing⁽²⁾ and Obayashi was forced to review their plans. They enlisted Sir Philip Dowson, the principal designer of Arup Associates (who had submitted a plan in the competition which retained the two outside elevations) as an advisor and the collaboration between him and Hopkins proved a fruitful one. The original elevations were retained and the middle section, the old print works, was demolished and replaced by a modern rounded glass section with the main entrance on Friday Street. The architects sourced the pink stone for the plinth of the new section from the same Staffordshire quarry as where the original sandstone came from.

Google Street view Cannon Street

Google satellite view of the site with the new middle section

The transit from plans by Obayashi of a completely new building to one which retained large parts of the original did not go as smoothly as may be suggested above or as Amery claims by calling it a “careful and courteous way in which the Japanese corporation accepted the restrictions of the listing”.⁽³⁾ A newspaper article in The Guardian of 11 August 1987, suggests initial opposition from Obayashi as the paper relates how “a Japanese construction company claimed […] that it would lose millions of pounds unless the Environment Secretary, Mr. Nicholas Ridley, allowed it to demolish […] Bracken House”. The demolition was opposed by the Thirties Society and Save Britain’s Heritage and they described the building as “the one thing that isn’t rubbish” and “constructed from high quality materials”. The two societies and English Heritage recommended that Bracken House be listed and a decision in April 1987 by the Department of the Environment to allow post-war buildings to be put forth for listing, had come at a most convenient time for those opposed to the Bracken House demolition. The Environment Minister followed the suggestion to list the building and Bracken House became the first post-war building to be protected in this way. To be fair to Obayashi, they took their loss sportingly and gave Hopkins and Dowson the subsequent brief to think again.

New section Friday Street

Who now looks at the building will probably conclude that it is a successful combination of old and new, but in 1987, opinions were less kind. Martin Pawley in The Guardian of 14 March, 1988, had obviously never been fond of the original Bracken House and much in favour of the Hopkins plan for a complete new building. He says that “if the construction does go ahead in this form, [it] will be even more negative and invisible than Richardson’s was. The new Bracken House will contribute to the raging homogenization of the past and the present that is everywhere making it more and more difficult to distinguish between them.” And, what he considers even worse, “the talent of one of our most brilliant designers had to be constrained in this way to make it work at all”. Well, how is that for a bit of negativism? If Hopkins had really objected as much as Pawley suggests, I am sure they would have declined the commission. I for one, although certainly no lover of great expanses of glass, do not fall out with the building at all, and tastes fortunately differ.

What makes (the original) Bracken House unique is the attention to detail and quality of material: the oak-leaf decoration around the main Cannon Street entrance, the lantern, the boxed-out bronze oriel windows with the free-standing ‘Egyptian’ columns, also made of bronze, and of course, the astronomical clock. It was designed in 1959 in gilt metal and enamel and shows Roman numerals, the months, and the signs of the zodiac, with the sun in the centre. The original design was even more elaborate and framed by Atlas figures, but they were lost in the final execution. A drawing of the first design was shown at the 1955 Royal Academy Exhibition by Albert Richardson himself, who was at the time President to the Academy. The zodiac signs have been ascribed to Frank Dobson and the face (as well as the oak-leaf mouldings around the door) is the work of Phillip Bentham.⁽⁴⁾ And yes, the face in the sun does resemble Winston Churchill, a tribute to him as Bracken‘s personal friend.

(1) Dan Cruickshank, “Changing times” in The Architects’ Journal, March 11/1988, pp. 26-29.
(2) http://list.english-heritage.org.uk/resultsingle.aspx?uid=1262582
(3) Colin Amery, Bracken House (1992).
(4) Philip Ward-Jackson, Public sculpture of the city of London (2003), pp. 59-60.

Daily Express

Tags

Aumonier, book trade, Daily Express, Fleet Street, newspapers

In 1932, the brand new art-deco building at 120 Fleet Street was opened to house the printing works and offices of the Daily Express.

William Maxwell (Max) Aitken, 1st Baron Beaverbrook (1879-1964), the owner of the paper, had commissioned the architects Ellis and Clarke to extend the existing Daily Express building towards Fleet Street. Complications arose with the original design because the printing room had to become one large space running through the basement of the old and the new building. Sir Evan Owen Williams (1890-1969), originally an aircraft designer who made his name as an architect with the concrete structures for the Wembley Exhibition of 1924, was drafted in to resolve the problems. His engineering skills were especially useful and he came up with the plan to construct a giant concrete box to house the printing room and to stop water from filtering into the building.
The outside of the building, which, in the original plan, was to be clad in Portland stone, was redesigned and is now faced with black glass panels with chromium strips. The western corner of the building was rounded off and in the recent refitting this was matched on the eastern corner. The wide entrance with chrome canopy above leads to the lobby which was designed by Robert Atkinson (1883-1952) and contains two massive plaster reliefs ‘Britain’ and ‘Empire’ designed by the sculptor Eric Aumonier (1899-1974). Aumonier came from an artistic Huguenot family who fled the Poitou region of France after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). Eric’s father, William (1869-1943) had also worked as a sculptor and carver, and his grandfather, another William (1839-1914) established a highly successful firm of architectural sculptors and carvers in New Inn Yard, Tottenham Court Road.⁽¹⁾

Daily Express relief detail

Very similar office buildings to the one in London, also clad in black glass, were opened by the Daily Express in Glasgow (1937) and Manchester (1939).
The newspaper vacated the London building in the late 1980s and the building was left empty for several years. Fortunately the present owner had the good sense to restore the lobby to its former glory as “the Byzantine vestibule and Sassanian lounge of Copper House” that so “rudely shocked” William Boot, the hero of Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop. This glamorous lobby, minus the “chrys-elephantine effigy of Lord Copper in coronation robes”⁽²⁾, can now be seen on Open House London days.⁽³⁾

Daily Express relief ‘Britain’

Daily Express relief ‘Empire’

You may also like to read the post on Ashentree Court and Northcliffe House or the one on Magpie Alley.

———

(1) J.C. Aumonier, “Aumônier: a Huguenot family from Haut-Poitou” in Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, vol. 18 (1947-1952), pp. 311-324; ‘William Aumonier Junior’ and ‘William Aumonier Senior’, Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851-1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011
(2) Evelyn Waugh, Scoop, 1938, pp. 29-30. Waugh worked for a short time in 1927 at the Daily Express.
(3) Most of the information in this post, except that on the Aumonier family, comes from the information sheet given out by openhouselondon.org.uk.

Magpie Alley

Tags

book trade, Fleet Street, newspapers

Fleet Street is named after the river Fleet that flows from Hampstead Heath down towards the Thames, although for most of its way it is hidden underground as it became so polluted and clogged up over the years that it was no longer navigable. In the eighteenth century it was covered over in sections, except for the first part on Hampstead Heath, so that no water can now be seen for most of its course. Fleet Street and the area around it has been associated with publishing since Wynkyn de Worde, William Caxton’s apprentice, set up business near Shoe Lane at the sign of the Sun in the year 1500 or 1501.

Wynkyn de Worde’s device
Source: www.martinfrost.ws

More printers and booksellers followed and from 1702 so did the newspapers, starting with the Daily Courant, followed by, among others, the Morning Advertiser, the Daily Telegraph, and the Daily Express. Bouverie Street, leading from Fleet Street to the Thames, was the home of the News of the World for a while. The newspapers have all moved out of the City to larger premises on the Isle of Dogs or in Wapping, but a memorial to the hustle and bustle of the publishing days can be seen in Magpie Alley.

You need to go slightly off the beaten track, but it is well worth having a look. From Fleet Street, turn into Bouverie Street (opposite number 160, Bouverie House) and walk down towards the river. Please note the great view of the OXO building across the river you have from here. Keep an eye out for Magpie Alley on your left.

Magpie Alley entrance (from Google Maps)

The alley leads to Whitefriars crypt (see here), but now I just want to draw your attention to the tiled wall of the alley which tells the story of the association of Fleet Street with publishing and printing through the ages.

Alan Brooke has written a booklet: Fleet Street. The Story of a Street (2010) with a wealth of information if you want to know more about the street.

You may also like to read the post on the Daily Express building or the one on Ashentree Court and Northcliffe House.