From The Times: February 28, 1924
Almost anywhere within a mile westward of Temple Bar, the east wind, blowing the dust of demolition into the Londoner’s eyes, compels him to weep the tears that in spirit he sheds unaided for the passing of the London that he knows. Under our smarting eyes 19th-century London is being torn to pieces.
In Regent Street, Jermyn Street, Westminster and the Strand, the housebreakers are at work and decorous fronts are thrown down, to reveal pitiful secrets of shabby wallpapers and disused hearths. What we call the West End is vanishing, with all its multicoloured memories. There is no use in lamenting what must be. We must move with the times.
Indeed there is some justice in the accusation that our tears must be crocodile’s tears, because we did not value old Regent Street while we had it. It was faced with stucco and stucco, we were taught, was a sham. Without stopping to ask ourselves whether a building-front of plaster painted over were any more a sham than stone or porcelain masking steel, or a stone facade over brick, we dulled ourselves to the clear Mozartian music of Regent Street, to the quiet, well-bred grace of a design produced by the flashiest and most vulgar age in English social history.
Of the London of the early 18th century enough is left, in Soho and in Westminster, to judge by. Beautiful as it is, its beauty is of a quiet, almost homely order, against which it is difficult to see a life so gallant and so courtly as that which first inhabited it. With Nash’s Regent Street the puzzle becomes acute. What had its pure grace, its subtle unity, in common with a noisy, violent, and brutal time? It was an age of ostentatious profligacy and impiety; an age in which some men enforced all the privileges to which rank or wealth entitled them, while others fiercely attacked all privilege.
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The puzzle of new London threatens to be as sharp as that of the London that is dissolving into dust. The new London is being built in Portland stone — a noble and durable stone that fits naturally the massive and the pompous.
One may look in vain for anything massive or pompous in the spirit of the age that has chosen it — a restless and uncertain age that were better expressed by any kind of material than by the hard, plain statement of Portland stone.
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