Oxford Street in 1875
Patrick Sawer reflects on the familiar buildings of his past that have disappeared in front of his eyes
When plans were announced to demolish the magnificent Art Deco building at 458 Oxford Street that has long been the flagship for M&S more than a few felt a pang of regret.
But, unless a planning inspector's report due shortly blocks the plans, Orchard House - Trehearne & Norman’s 1929 masterpiece - will soon be reduced to dust and rebuilt as ten storeys of new flats, shops, offices and a gym.
I imagine my mother, fresh from Rome, took me there as a baby, such was the reputation of Marks & Spencer even in 1960s Italy. So it must have been with generations of shoppers and their children.
Most people of a certain age inevitably come to notice the landscape shifting beneath their feet, as familiar buildings succumb to the developer’s wrecking ball or crumble into dust.
But I’ve detected a pattern, and for me it’s personal.
All too many of the buildings with which I’ve had an intimate connection, or the institutions which occupied those buildings, have gone.
It is as if my mental landscape is being scrubbed clean of its physical reference points.
From my first home, to where I was educated and first made a living, I’ve come to notice them disappear, close down or be transformed into something completely different.
Let’s start at the beginning, at the building into which I was born in December 1964.
This was St Teresa’s Maternity Hospital near Wimbledon Common, opened 13 years earlier by Sir William Gilliatt, gynaecologist to the Queen, as a new extension to an older hospital for women and run by Catholic nuns from the Order of St Anne.
But in January 1968, despite a ‘march of prams’ to the House of Commons in protest and an impassioned speech by Earl Ferrers citing its lower than average mortality rates, maternity services were transferred elsewhere. In 1986, the entire hospital was demolished and 23 houses built in its place.
With hindsight the pattern was being set.
In his journal my father David describes our basement flat in Lordship Lane, in East Dulwich, as “impossible to improve”, by which he meant not perfect but the opposite - impervious to the nascent vogue for DIY.
It was here that my parents brought their new baby and here that my mother Giuseppina would put me out in the small back garden in my pram to listen to the Beatles and Rolling Stones on the BBC Light Programme, while she got on with chores such as making blackberry jam to sell on the doorstep to supplement my father’s teaching income.
But the house, with all its faults, idiosyncrasies and tender memories is long gone and that back yard built over. It was replaced in 2004 by a block of ‘luxury’ apartments called The Levande, where a one bedroom flat now costs £1,150 a month to rent or upwards of £400,000 to buy.
The mania for demolition bypassed the two bedroom terraced council house on the edge of Chelmsford, in Essex, to where my parents moved after returning to England, following several years in Rome. But it didn’t spare the school in Oxford, where I arrived in 1976 in a state of high excitement at moving to a city I knew would have a proper comics shop.
Donnington Middle School was levelled in 2003, its austere 1930s brick walls, parquet hall flooring and seemingly endless expanse of concrete playground, along with the scratchy blackboards, and the gym benches we sat on, replaced with assisted living apartments for the elderly.
A short walk away stood the comprehensive to which we all decanted from Donnington at the age of 14; Cowley St John Upper School.
But that too is long gone.
The year after I left Cowley St John’s sixth form, in the summer of 1983, the Church of England aided school was merged with the Catholic aided St Edmund Campion School and renamed St Augustine’s. This was Oxford after all, where you can take your pick of saints, as a glance at the city map will testify.
For some inexplicable reason Oxford’s education authority chose to ignore the passionately eloquent speech of one pupil at a public meeting held in the school’s theatre calling for Cowley St John to be saved. And yes dear reader, that pupil was me.
However, it wasn’t sectarianism that did for the new St Augustine’s - whose parents included Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and Caribbean Baptists as well as Protestants and Papists - but council cuts.
Oxford’s three tier school system was ‘rationalised’ into two tiers and in 2003 St Augustine’s and the Sixties building which had been so formative - and where my fellow pupils were more likely to include the children of Cowley car plant assembly workers and NHS nurses than academics - was replaced by the city council’s adult education centre.
And while my university, Newcastle, still stands in all its 1880s red brick splendour, the Philosophy Department that formed the core of my degree was shut a few years after my graduation in 1987, one of many provincial philosophy departments to suffer the same fate.
The department was later revived and moved to the late 1960s Henry Daysh Building, but it's legendary ‘cave’ - an informal room within the Victorian-era Armstrong Building named in honour of Plato’s eponymous allegory and where callow students and wiser tutors discussed the merits of Wittgenstein and Leibniz - now echoes other disciplines.
And so to the world of work, where change in late eighties Thatcher’s Britain was a constant.
Up the hill from my home off east Oxford’s Cowley Road stood the Not the Moulin Rouge cinema, the giant Can Can dancer’s legs on its facade a beacon of quirky art house sophistication.
Here I would sell tickets to the city’s cinephiles during the summer months. Among them one evening was - paradoxically given East Oxford’s proud labour tradition - the then Northern Ireland secretary Douglas Hurd, who came, without any obvious security detail, to a showing of Heat and Dust.
But after I headed down the M40 to start a new chapter in the city of my birth the Can Can legs came crashing to the ground, along with the auditorium I’d helped to paint, to be turned into another row of flats.
So was W. Lucy & Co’s engineering works in Jericho, where I had spent one summer bolting electricity transformer parts together for a Saudi power station contract.
The Eagle Ironworks, opened by William Carter in 1825, closed in 2007, when the firm began to concentrate on its property assets as one of Oxford’s biggest private landlords, letting to Town and Gown alike. The 19th century shop floor of what was one of the city’s oldest engineering plants, along with the works canteen which served huge trays of cheese and toast for breakfast, was replaced by canal side apartments.
My first salaried job in London was with the British Council, helping to spread the benefits of the country’s language and culture overseas.
The ‘council’ managed to survive repeated Government cuts to its budget, just, but its offices off Oxford St - the only place I’ve ever had an office to myself - did not.
As if fate had decreed, a year after I left in 1990 to make my way in journalism, the British Council left Dover St - later demolished -and its Portland Place office opposite the BBC’s Broadcasting House and moved the majority of its departments to Manchester and its headquarters at 10 Spring Gardens, overlooking Admiralty Arch.
Returning to London after completing a journalism course at Darlington’s College of Technology - which, you guessed it, was soon after moved from its home in a rambling Victorian building to a modern industrial park on the edge of the town - I got a job on a thriving local paper
The free tabloid covered several boroughs across south west London and Surrey, with a patch that allowed its reporters to tackle the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in 1992, the annual AELTC tennis championships and the long running row and equally long running public enquiry over the building of Heathrow’s Terminal Five.
This was all masterminded by a Fleet Street veteran called Sid Williams - who had been on the Daily Mirror’s investigations team during the 1960s - from a nondescript concrete and glass building above the railway tracks near Teddington Station.
The paper itself, The Informer, went the way of many local rags and closed down in 1999 and for several years the building, where residents had wandered in with news tips and complaints about council services, lay empty.
But that patch of land, where any reporting skills I can claim to have were honed under Sid’s watchful eye, was too valuable to remain unexploited.
Last year a smart apartment block, all edgy exposed brick and iron railings, opened in its place.
And in a touching, for me at least, reference to its recent past the building now bears the name Informer House.
Another building where I cut my journalistic teeth, working weekend and evening shifts at The Express, near Blackfriars Bridge, was also demolished soon after to make way for a sparkling new glass and steel development - despite the fact it had its own bar.
There are a number of exceptions to this rule of my personal landscape being demolished.
Northcliffe House, home of the Evening Standard and Mail Newspapers, where I went on to ply my trade for a decade from 1997, still stands on Kensington High Street in all its French Art Deco magnificence (though the Standard’s newsroom itself recently moved to smaller offices in the City and nearby Kensington Market, where I’d shop as a teenager for punk clothes on trips from Oxford, has long gone, demolished in 2001 and replaced by generic high street names).
The buildings of my Roman years have also escaped either destruction or brutal transformation.
The early 20th century house in the Liberty style where we rented a ground floor apartment in Monteverde Vecchio - one of the Eternal City’s seven hills - still stands, as does my first school, la Scuola dell'Infanzia Comunale Francesco Crispi, a five minute walk away.
Perhaps that says something about the Italians’ respect for the history that surrounds them, even in their domestic buildings.
While il bel paese’s modern suburbs have often been little to send a postcard home about - as the society columnist played by Marcello Mastroianni in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita discovered - it’s planners never indulged in the British mania for driving dual carriageways and flyovers through their historic towns and cities, or levelling entire neighbourhoods that would have been better restored and revived with their community’s participation than replaced with atomising tower blocks.
Here many will look around them and recognise my experience, the sensation of a disappearing personal landscape, a sensation embodying - or should that be disembodying - the upheaval of British society and its buildings since the late 1950s. A place where - to paraphrase one old German philosopher - everything that was solid melted into air.
*Patrick Sawer is a Senior News Reporter on The Telegraph
