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A colour photograph captures the graceful, cantilevered curves of the Grand Staircase at the National Liberal Club.

No Minimalism Here

Written by Simon Rigge on . Posted in Blog.

Walk into the National Liberal Club at 1 Whitehall Place and what do you see? No minimalism! The Grand Staircase sets the tone. Beyond lie reception rooms richly decorated in Classical and Gothic Revival styles, a warm and inviting venue for launching an architecture book.

A colour photograph of a round table and four leather-backed chairs standing on a Turkey carpet marks the place where Sheldrake Press had their first meeting with the co-author of ‘Doors of London’, Melanie Backe-Hansen.
At this table in the Smoking Room we held our first meeting with Melanie Backe-Hansen.

Our new architecture book Doors of London started life in the Smoking Room at the National Liberal Club and got its first public airing in the Authors’ Club Lounge there last week. 

Wind back to February 2020. We are looking for an author to write the text of Doors of London and we plan to ask the house historian Melanie Backe-Hansen. Our editor Chris Schüler, himself an accomplished author and past Chairman of the Authors’ Club, arranges for us to meet her at the Club.

We have a slightly unusual challenge to put to her. The photographer Cath Harries has approached us with the idea of doing a book on doors. She has amassed an archive of door pictures from across London and we need a writer to make sense of them, to explain the city’s development over the centuries and provide a thumbnail history of each area. Is that something she can take on?

She can.

Doors, doors, doors

The project kicked off in 2010 when Cath was on an assignment for a pub guide. She started to notice the doors she passed en route to the pubs, and when she had finished the job, she found she had 300 to 350 photographs of doors. Intrigued, she started making journeys specifically to look for doors. She discovered Art Deco doors, doors covered in street art, doors of mansion blocks, doors in different styles across London. By the time she reached out to us, she had at least 3,000 photographs of doors.

Against the green end wall and faience-tiled Corinthian columns in the Smoking Room at the National Liberal Club, the editorial team on ‘Doors of London’ pose for a photograph at the end of the evening.
Anti-clockwise from front left, Cath Harries, Melanie Backe-Hansen, Chris Schüler and Simon Rigge are the last to leave the Smoking Room at the end of the evening.

If you’re publishers interested in architectural history, like us, all too often your problem is finding the pictures. We’d been here before. When we were planning The Victorian House Book, a style and home improvement manual by the interior designer Robin Guild, we needed pictures of doors and other architectural details. We had to approach picture agencies, do location research and commission architectural photographers, a time-consuming and onerous task.

This time the problem was the other way round. We had an embarrassment of doors. Cue Chris Schüler, Editor of Doors of London. Introducing the book to a sell-out audience at the Authors’ Club a week ago, he explained that it had been many years in the making. ‘We had Covid to overcome.’ Unable to meet in person, move images around on a table top, debate, disagree and decide how to form them into groups, we failed to assemble a coherent structure. Zoom didn’t cut it. The first layouts produced remotely did not stack up. We had to tear the book up and start again.

Finally, just before Christmas last year, the book was finished, printed, shipped and published.

A gallery of styles

The front cover of ‘Doors of London’ features Denis Severs’ house in Spitalfields with the book title printed in white on the black front door.
Back to the 18th century.

Doors of London encourages the reader to view the city in a different way, to see familiar scenes with fresh eyes. Instead of walking from A to B, eyes straight ahead, take a moment to look to your left and right. Presented in plain sight is an open-air gallery of styles and decorative touches. The front entrance is the focal point of any façade, the image that catches your eye as you walk up to press the bell or knock the knocker. It is what makes the first impression. It reflects how the owners want to portray themselves to the world. It is a status symbol.

Over the centuries a grammar of ornament developed to make that vital first impression in the most striking way possible: decorative canopies, swags and floral designs, pillars, pilasters, fanlights, pediments and cornices. Architectural detail of every imaginable kind was deployed to catch and delight the visitor’s eye.

As Thomas Blaikie writes in this month’s Literary Review, ‘few, if any, doorways of whatever period are minimalist’. The majority of examples seen in Doors of London, he points out, are drawn from classically designed terraces, ‘which is no surprise since this type of building predominated in London for almost two centuries’.

In this colour photograph, the lights are on, the seats laid out and the bar ready at the Authors’ Club for the evening talk on doors.
Seats are ready for the talk at the Authors’ Club.

Just about the only minimalist doors in the book are those of the Queen Elizabeth Hall, ‘which appear to be made of stone with glass panels,’ writes Blaikie, ‘though the material is in fact sand-cast aluminium’.

‘It’s like the National Theatre,’ said Chris Schüler during his talk in the Authors’ Club Lounge, ‘where you can see the patterns of the wooden shuttering into which the concrete was poured.’

A colour photograph shot down the length of the Smoking Room at the National Liberal Club reveals a vast expanse of Turkey carpet, wood panelling, Corinthian columns, marble busts and oil portraits lit by brass chandeliers.
Marble busts, wood panelling, Corinthian columns and portraits of Liberal statesmen decorate the magnificent interior of the Smoking Room.

It’s not the conventional wisdom among architects, but for the man in the street, minimalism is of little interest. Architectural style is what appeals, whether Classical or Gothic, neo-Roman, Renaissance Revival, Dutch Revival, Queen Anne Revival, Italianate or Venetian. Or, as at the National Liberal Club, a glorious hotch-potch. 

In a colour photograph shot in the bar at the National Liberal Club, swagged curtains and dark wood panelling are warmly lit by table lamps as members chat in comfort at spaciously laid out tables.
Grand conviviality is no oxymoron, as we discovered in the bar after our evening talk.

Designed by Alfred Waterhouse, best known for his Natural History Museum, the Club was intended as a relatively informal, all-inclusive meeting place for Liberals with a capital L and liberals of all stripes, and it still performs its intended function. Presided over by giant portraits of its founder, William Ewart Gladstone, and other luminaries from Asquith to Campbell Bannerman and Lloyd George, it exudes a sense of occasion. You enter the bar through magnificent mahogany and bevelled-glass swing doors, sit on comfortable leather banquettes or in capacious armchairs and find yourself, while talking books, mingling with live Liberal MPs. The place is buzzing with exuberance.

But what tops the bill is the architecture, ornament piled on with a palette knife, all that minimalists love to hate. Thank God, no minimalism here!

Here’s to a thousand years of door design, spread out in crisp and glorious colour in the Doors of London. 

 


More articles…
Evening Talk on Doors, Doors of London, The Victorian House Book, Honouring Past Craftsmen

Architecture