Faraday House, Queen Victoria Street EC4

Possibly the nastiest, flashiest and most offensive building in London is Faraday House. It caused outrage when it was built in 1932, sticking up right in front of St Pauls. Legislation quickly followed banning high rise buildings along certain key views over London, but the opportunity was not taken to demolish the bloody thing as it had been built not by greedy developers but by the government! Yes, Faraday House was designed and built by the Office of Works as the City of London's telephone exchange. The architect was one A.R. Myers.
It has one redeeming feature, a line of rather jolly carved keystones over the ground floor windows. To a casual glance they look like traditional outcrops of fruit and veg, but they are actually telecommunications apparatus including telephones, undersea cables, and even relays. One shows electrical signals girdling the earth, girdle girdle girdle, as E. L. Wisty put it so memorably. The arches at either end have the head of Mercury, the messenger of the gods, with his winged helmet. His caduceus, a winged staff with two serpents entwined round it, is reproduced in bronze.

Former City of London School for Boys, Victoria Embankment EC4

Right on the outside, bottom of the list of priorities in Victorian education, are science and engineering. To the left, G.W. Seale has placed Geometry, with her drawing board and dividers, and Mathematics with her...er...drawing board and dividers. She also balances a globe on her other hand, presumably in tribute to her vital contribution to navigation.
To the right, Chemistry holds a test tube and Mechanics has one hand casually draped over a gear wheel and the other holding a device that I cannot identify - possibly a limited slip diff for an early model Ford. An Archimedian screw completes the composition.
Of course, everything is different now. Technology is still bottom of the educational heap, of course, but today's high-flying students shun the classics and poetry in favour of law and, god help us, media studies.

Former City of London School for Boys, Victoria Embankment EC4

The central arch of the school is graced by the Classics and Poetry, and they are supported on either side by Art and History.
To the left G.W. Seale has carved Drawing and Music, as lively a pair of girlies as could be imagined being turned away by the porter for not being properly dressed for a Victorian educational institution. Drawing is doing a quick sketch of the bust of a bearded Greek philosopher. Music is blowing a strange flute thing, with a harp ready at her feet for the next item on the programme.
To the right is History, represented by girl scribes from ancient and modern times.
Ancient girl is carving some sort of lettering on a monument. What language is it? The letters look vaguely like cuneiform, but that may just be my ignorance. The girl's costume doesn't help identify what civilisation she comes from (there is not much of it) and her hairstyle is generic 'exotic ancient civilizations style', as worn by Elizabeth Taylor in so many movies.
Modern history is represented by a properly dressed female angel, with wings, writing on a scroll. The lamp of Holy Scripture provides illumination.
Looking back through the kaleidoscope of the 1960s, can we see the origin of many hangups and traumas here?

Adana, 162 Gray's Inn Road WC1

I used to do letterpress printing at school. We painstakingly set Christmas cards, letterheads and programmes for the school play in traditional type, printing them on a large Arab press the art master had finaggled from somewhere. Smaller items were printed on a fleet of Adana presses, sold from this shop, which opened in 1950 though the Art Deco fascia makes it look rather 1930s.
Adana was set up to cater for the amateur printer, and very helpful they were when I visited to buy boxes of 14pt Perpetua capitals and new rollers for my flatbed press.
Letterpress has gone the way of chemical photography, pianolas and steam locos, though Adana hung on until as late as 1999. I still have my old Adana flatbed in the shed. It is just too good to throw away.
Happily, the old shop is still a printshop, so the sign is still appropriate. There is a short history of the company here.

Fishmongers Hall, London Bridge EC4

It's not often my twin obsessions with architecture and boats combine, but Fishmongers Hall is one of those points with its merfolk supporters in the armorial bearings in stone on the facade. They were carved in 1831 by masons employed by the contractors, the ubiquitous Cubitt brothers. There is a post about it at rowingforpleasure.blogspot.com.

Treasure House, 19-21 Hatton Garden EC1

Few of the old 'quarters' where trades used to congregate survive. Savile Row is on its last legs, and even Soho has fewer sex shops than it did. But Hatton Garden is still the headquarters of the diamond trade, and most of the shops are jewellers, so the architectural references to the trade remain potent.
Treasure House, built in 1907 to designs by Niven & Wigglesworth, has a particularly nice set of carvings illustrating the getting, making and uses of gold.
They are not in any particular sequence, unusually, so mining, which logically should be on the left, is centre right. The miner is holding a prybar, looking for a seam in the stratified rock to the light of a Davy lamp.
To his left is a foundryman kneeling in front of a furnace, holding a cauldron of molten metal with a pair of tongs. Shockingly, he is in bare feet - call Health and Safety for some boots before he melts his feet off, someone!The goldsmith is on the far left, with a press behind him and holding a hammer.
The rest of the figures are customers, one man and two women, which may reflect Hatton Garden's 'footfall' quite well. A girl admires herself with a mirror, and......a rather self-satisfied woman gloats over her jewellery - note the box on the seat next to her, overflowing with tom.Finally, a military-looking gent holds a huge gold vase of the type that grateful insurance companies used to give to victorious admirals and generals.
The sculptor does not seem to be recorded, and there are no signatures on the works themselves. On stylistic grounds I think it may be by Charles Doman, who in 1907 was assisting the elderly Albert Hodge, who did other work for Niven & Wigglesworth. Another candidate would be L.F. Roselieb - see Norway House. Anyone know better?

Silken Hotel, Aldwych (again)

One more group from the facade of the old Gaiety Restaurant. These girls represent Sculpture, Architecture and Painting.
Few of the other groups can be photographed well because of the plane trees in front.








Interesting to compare with the trees in 1903.

The Kingly Street black sheep

Many memorable ornamental details in London are basically advertising, so it is satisfying to come across one which is an advertisement for an advertising agency.
The sheep in Kingly Street, just behind Hamley's in Regent Street, is the symbol of Bartle Bogle Hegarty, who pride themselves on fighting above their weight. Despite the relatively small number of people they employ, they get lots of awards and can point to lots of campaigns you will remember, such as the bloke stripping off in the launderette for Levis, and Audi's fixed-in-the-brain-so-you'll-never-get-rid-of-it 'Vorsprung Durch Technik'.
BBH's first campaign for Levi's was for black jeans, then unheard-of. BBH did a poster with a crowd of white sheep going in one direction, like....er....sheep. And one black sheep going in the other direction.
Suited executives at Levi Strauss hated it, for two reasons:
1) It didn't mention jeans, and
2) It didn't feature girls with big knockers.
But it was a huge success, and many years later BBH adopted the black sheep as its corporate logo. And there it is, proudly advertising their London HQ.

24 Great James Street

This is a house that is not at all what it appears. To a casual glance it is early Georgian, like the rest of Great James Street - which is one of the finest Georgian streets in London. The blue plaque claiming that Dorothy L. Sayers, creator of aristocratic 'tec Lord Peter Wimsey, lived there in the 1920s adds verisimilitude to that impression.
But the house was totally rebuilt in the 1960s, with a very grand doorcase recycled from a demolished 1720s house in Great Ormond Street.
The giveaway is the way the doorcase is too tall for the ground floor, protruding up into the first floor. As a result, the window above does not line up with the others in a very unClassical way.
But the doorcase itself is fabulous and thank heaven it was saved.
Under the pediment is a carving of the Phoenix on its funeral pyre, its wings outspread in a sort of blessing before it expires, secure in the knowledge that it will come back in an egg born in the ashes.

Fox and Anchor, Charterhouse Street

What are these extraordinary creatures, perched on a ledge on the Fox and Anchor in Smithfield as though about to pounce on unsuspecting drinkers at the pavement tables below? They cannot be foxes, surely. They looks more like hellhounds with those pointed ears and gappy mouths.
The facade is high Art Nouveau, designed by W.J. Neatby in 1898, so it is possible they started as foxes and got transmogrified in the interests of Art.
The whole frontage is covered in Doulton faience, a material designed to last for ever and a favourite of Art Nouveau designers. A favourite Art Nouveau motif is the peacock, which makes its appearence just below the hellhounds.

33 Eastcheap

One of the unexpected side effects of encouraging decoration in architecture is that it perpetuates the history of the site. The architect has to come up with suitable decorative motifs, and history is often a rich source of inspiration.
At 33 Eastcheap, built in 1868, the architect Robert Lewis Roumieu placed a vigorous portrait of a boar crashing through some undergrowth at the centre of his design. Why? After all, the place was a vinegar warehouse, despite the faintly ecclesiastical tone of the Victorian Psycho style architecture.
The answer is rather interesting and splendid. The site was that of the Boar's Head Tavern, haunt of that great tosspot Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV Part II.
The building is sadly neglected at the moment. I think it would be totally spiffing if it were converted back into the Boar's Head Tavern, specialising in cakes and ale, apple-johns, canary wine, mouldy stewed prunes and dried cakes.

Peek House, Eastcheap

The entire south side of Eastcheap was demolished in 1882 to allow the Metropolitan Line to be excavated, and in 1883 the firm of Peek Bros, Tea and Coffee Importers, built a grand new office at No 20 with a circular corner tower. To liven the tower up, they got William Theed the Younger to carve an alto relievo depiction of their coffee being brought across the sands of Araby on the backs of three camels led by a Bedouin in his flowing robes. It's straight out of Desert Song.
Theed loved exotic subjects, having done the Africa section on the Albert Memorial and a line of horses for Buckingham Palace.
Why is it so deadly serious but chuckle-out-loud funny at the same time? I think it is the way the driver is striding so purposefully with his robes flowing out behind, such is his determination to reach Eastcheap before the Peek brothers (Fred and Jim) get fed up with waiting and go to the pub.

68 Vincent Square

The ramshackle old buildings of the old Rochester Row police station have been replaced by brand-new ramshackle buildings designed by neo-Classicist architect John Simpson, and in front is an intriguing image of the god Priapus by Alexander Stoddart.

It is in the form of a herma, a rectangular block with the head of the god on top. In ancient Greece, hermae usually represented the god Hermes, and had the god's genitals carved on it low down where passers-by could stroke them for luck. Whether the luck was with the passer-by or the god is not recorded.

The Priapus herma, and the associated two large bronze roundels with the heads of Thyrsis and Corydon, illustrate a section of Virgil's Eclogue VII.

Unfortunately, Westminster planning department declined to allow the artist to provide Priapus with his endowments, so he is represented as the god of gardening, complete with garden shears. "Now we have raised thee Priapus of bronze, such as the times admit" reads the inscription.

Stoddart's drawing is from his website. My picture was taken at totally the wrong time of day. Next time I pass in the morning I will try and get a better photo.

65 Vincent Square

65 Vincent Square, Westminster, is a Mies-inspired office block built 1958-60 by A.V.Farrier and recently restored. Being Mies-inspired, the facade is all thin vertical sections with bright blue ceramic panels between. It is all very plain and formfollowsfunctional. But a little carved panel above the door lends genuine delight, simply by being something Mies would have disapproved of. It shows a Roman homestead with farmers hoiking great big jars about, fruit trees behind being picked by a buxom Roman nudist fruit-picker, and a woman seated on a throne inspecting a chicken. Below her, a basket of eggs. The motto reads Deus hanc domum secundet, which I think means 'God be in this house' but if anyone knows better, tell me.