25 Aug 2013 00:39:45
It is now a museum, having been decommissioned in 1993, and is popular with ghost hunters. There have been strange sightings in the low‑ceilinged corridors and the long‑since disconnected telephones are said sometimes to ring. But you don't need to believe in the supernatural to feel the horror. The complex is redolent of cold war menace and human inadequacy. If the bomb had dropped there would not have been much hope inside or out – but I think inside, in the "female dormitory" or the tiny "sick room", would have been much, much worse.
From the caves of Lascaux to Hack Green the spaces people create can retain their makers' imprint long after they are altered or abandoned. Even interiors that have been entirely lost can leave a mark that hangs in the cultural air. Edward Hollis's ramble through some of them brings together an oddly assorted group of sites in various stages of existence, including the Crystal Palace, Versailles, the old Palace of Westminster and his grandmother's sitting room. Granny's room, with its collection of knick-knacks, pictures and souvenirs, is the keyhole through which Hollis passes at the beginning of each section of the book to discover what influence the spaces he visits still wield.
Early interiors were relatively fluid. Furniture was scarce in the middle ages and anybody rich enough to own some took it with them when they travelled. Centuries before Terence Conran pioneered flat-pack furniture medieval monarchs had tables designed to be easily dismantled and carried, along with draught-excluding tapestries, plate and much else to the next stop on the royal progress. This literally moveable feast came to rest most often during the 13th century at the Palace of Westminster, which became the principal royal residence. Parliament met there and, over time, the building grew haphazardly into an ant heap in which majesty rubbed shoulders with commerce and downright squalor. The Commons sat in the medieval St Stephen's chapel, while round them lords, tourists, law courts and the proprietors of a pub and various shops that were built into the walls, carried on their business. The problem of how to rationalise the building was much debated, before being abruptly solved in 1834 when fire destroyed most of the old palace. Yet of all the ghost buildings of Britain, medieval Westminster casts perhaps the longest shadow.
More of it survived than Hollis admits. Not only the great hall but parts of the cloister and all of Edward I's chapel of St Mary Undercroft, which is still in use. In the nave the light, filtered through Victorian stained glass, speaks of its many-layered history. Less tangibly, the rituals of the medieval palace have been developed so effectively that Hollis finds the state opening "as repetitive, and enchanting as a fairytale". Perhaps, but it has not "always been the same" and the Queen does not "put on her crown, and climb into a glass carriage". The modern ceremony, in which the crown is conveyed in a separate coach, dates partly from 1852, when Queen Victoria inaugurated the new House of Commons and partly from 1901, when Edward VII plumped up the pageantry after a long decline during his mother's widowhood. The resulting form is still elastic. In 2006 there was for the first time an elected Lord Speaker. The first holder of the new office was a lady, Baroness Hayman, for whom a role – and an outfit – had to be found.
It is undoubtedly the lingering echoes of the old palace that make such subtle evolution possible, but this is not to say, as Hollis does, that at the state opening, "No one has ever understood what was going on, for, in Britain, nothing ever changes." He is much given to these knowingly portentous pronouncements, which sometimes tip him over the edge of meaning, as when he says "there's a problem with memory, for if we could remember what was there before the beginning, how would it be the beginning?"
In fact, as he demonstrates, the French revolution, one of the most thorough attempts to achieve a new beginning, left monuments of the ancien régime in a state of suspended animation that exudes a powerful sense of what was there before. At Versailles the very emptiness of the Sun King's palace speaks volumes. Behind the hum of tourists is a deep silence. Hollis characteristically overstates the case by suggesting that the palace can never be reinhabited "lest the revolution revolve back upon itself and time begin again", but its symbolic weight is unmistakable. The revolution did not only dismantle palaces. At the Abbey of St Denis the royal tombs were broken open and removed. As an observant monk remarked at the time, the work of 12 centuries was destroyed in three days. The tombs are back now, the vaults restored and yet the church feels dead, as if some vital artery had been severed. The spirit of place cannot always be restored. Just as vanished buildings can still exert a force, so places that survive materially may lose their resonance.
Hollis does not consider St Denis, indeed although he is prepared to include the Georgian cess pits of London as "a city of lost interiors", he is curiously oblivious to religious spaces, which might have served him well. Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, at the meeting point of east and west, has Christianity and Islam intermingled on its walls. In England there are great Victorian churches, St Mary's, Paddington and St Augustine's Pendlebury, which stand like beached galleons, the dates of their last memorials marking the point at which industry ebbed away and took the population with it.
But Hollis seems to dislike the Victorians. For him the chief monuments of the 19th century are "gin palaces, department stores, expositions, railway stations, arcades and theatres", all of which revolved around "the cash nexus". Thus he finds the Great Exhibition soiled by commerce, its Crystal Palace "a disposable, forgettable, commodity". This is unfair. The commissioners appointed to invest the exhibition's profits bought a piece of land that they developed into Albertopolis, the site on which the South Kensington museums and the Royal Colleges of Art and Music still stand.
In so far as he has a point Hollis is forever wandering off it, on to the sets of Gone With the Wind, into the Big Brother house and back again to Granny. For his conclusion he drifts out on the notion that we no longer require interiors, everything is in "the cloud" in cyberspace. In fact most people now own more furniture than a medieval king, magazine journalists stalk the halls of the famous and fashionable, while every struggling European town is keen to build a culture palace, hoping for the Bilbao effect. The dramatic power of what Hogarth called "a scene of furniture" is unlikely to lose its grip on the human imagination in any foreseeable future.
