JOBS 1973
So, after Manchester, London was the place – streets paved with gold and all that!
September 1973 - October 1974 Leonard Manasseh and Partners
I had got a job lined up from Manchester with Leonard Manasseh and Partners in 'Fitzrovia', the area to the west of Tottenham Court Road. It was delightfully cosmopolitan but not as spoilt (in those days) as Soho - Charlotte Street ran up the centre of it, but Leonard was in a converted warehouse in the parallel Rathbone Street. It had been the stamping ground of the Bloomsbury Group, and quite by chance the controversial feature film 'Peeping Tom' has its opening sequence filmed in Rathbone Street at about this date, panning past Leonard's office; the picture agency; the working man's 'caff' where I took my mid-day meal; and the pub we went to in the evening. Schmidt's Restaurant, famous for the rudeness of its waiters, was at the head of the street.
I stayed in David's flat in Ladbroke Grove, sleeping on the floor in the front room, which had been abandoned for living purposes and was full of junk. Sorry, correction, David's art lecturing aids (like five Routemaster red buses grading in size from Matchbox to child's sit on - to be photographed against a real one). The whole building was pretty basic and decrepit. The shilling in the slot gas meter had been broken into long ago after the landlord stopped collecting the money, and a single shilling was used repeatedly. One day the bell rang and a bloke who introduced himself as “An inspector from the Gas Board” insisted on examining the meter and the flat, though he did seem a bit tense. What to do? I showed him the meter with the padlock hanging off and made no comment - neither did he, he went, and nothing more was heard about it. Sometime later the whole house was sold to a Housing Association and renovated - I suspect he was actually from the Council prior to a compulsory purchase order.
In those days most architects did not have drafting machines – that is, a wooden drawing board on a height and angle adjustable stand, with either a horizontal ruler edge that slid up and down on which you rested a T square, or a full pantograph parallel motion mechanism; instead we used our own double-elephant sized drawing boards propped at a slant on two bricks. Leonard's practice was on the first and second floor of the warehouse, you went up a staircase from the street into the receptionist's office and the first thing you saw was a magnificent perspective drawing of the summit of Snowdon from the air, showing Leonard's proposed summit railway station and cafe. The second thing you saw (never to be forgotten) were the magnificent breasts of Jill Horton the receptionist.
Leonard and his partner Ian Baker had a joint office at the front overlooking the street, with the studio to the rear. I was on the next floor under Geoffrey ???? an interior design specialist and three? others Alex , ???? and ????. This floor was shared with another practice specialising in acoustics and theatre auditorium design. Being dyslexic with faces (hello Norman Foster!) the first thing I did was to draw a plan of the office for myself with all the desks labelled with the occupant's names. The practice was prestigious and had won several major awards for innovative housing (Brockle's Mead in Harlow) and Beaulieu Motor Museum for Baron Montagu (Britain's first monorail).
When I joined, the summit of Snowdon job had just been abandoned by the client - a pity, it would have been a great job to work on; a different design has recently been realised. The job in progress was Wellington Country Park for the Duke of Wellington, substantially built by that time. The government apparently had just introduced a scheme which gave large land owners lots of dosh to develop a derelict bit of land into a Country Park, providing open air recreation and access to nature for the public (at a cost). WCP was the first, developed round some flooded gravel pits, which were used for boating and sailing, with an 'Orientation Centre'; gift shop; cafe; changing rooms and toilets. The timber boathouse on the lake had been sketched by Leonard, but I was given the job of designing it in detail. Alas, it was demolished 10 years later when boating became uneconomic as Health and Safety demanded an instructor in every dinghy, and all that can be seen now is the concrete floor slab hidden in the grass.
There was also the interior design of the foyer of the British Council building next to Admiralty Arch. This was one of my triumphs - Geoffrey had drawn a huge carpet shaped like one half of a Yin Yang symbol, bordered by a continuous 'S' curve of seating. How to do it? I scanned the product catalogues and eventually came up with a firm that made wedge shaped banquette seats, which were designed to be put together on the inside or outside of a fixed circle, ostensibly of no use to us because our radius varied continuously. But I discovered by varying the number of the two types next to each other I could fit our curves reasonably well! I must say the finished effect was impressive. It lasted quite a long time, but I went back about 15 years later and the whole foyer had been re-planned.
But there was a competition for Bath Law Courts, on which everyone's job depended. The empty site, known as 'The Podium' (perhaps it was a bomb site) was high on the bank of the river, next to a frightful 60's hotel above a multi-storey car park. The plans and elevations had all been finished, but they needed some presentation 'visualisations'. Leonard, wandering the rooms at night, had evidently spotted my private, in my own time, experiments with perspective. So he proposed I map out four or five perspectives which he would sketch over. I had the drawings and a lot of photographs of the site to work from. The deal was that I should do it in the evenings and he would pay me overtime. He also had a professional model made. So I set to work, and learned a lesson. My method was primarily mathematical, using a programmable calculator to transform the 3D vertex coordinates into 2D picture-plane coordinates, depending on the 3D viewpoint coordinate and the picture-plane distance. This could not be wrong, and is how modern computers do it.
He wanted a particular view from the first floor window over a semi-dome of a building across the street, “How wide angle do you want it?” I asked, and he suggested quite a wide angle (and therefore a close picture-plane). The drawing developed and I came to doing the dome, which came out rather distorted, as it would have in a fish-eye photograph. He refused to believe it was correct. Eventually 'Mog' photographed the model and collaged the cut out photos onto street photographs; which to be honest looked very good, and the perspective sketches were dropped. The dome looked exactly as I had drawn it. The project never happened, I don't know why, a great shame, it was a beautiful design - there is a Waitrose called 'The Podium' on the site now, and new distributed Law Courts were subsequently constructed on a larger less central site. I wasn't paid the overtime; and was made redundant in October 1974. That was the last time I did a wide angle perspective, I stuck to picture-plane distances which would be about the actual viewing distance of the drawing.
January 1975 – January 1976 G Alan Herbert and Partners
So here we see immediately a problem - the 'G'; he was a troubled soul and very difficult to work with. He was not an architect but a middle aged civil engineer who had taken an architect partner to develop that side of the business. He had been employed in the Department of Environment Property Services Agency (which was disbanded sometime later due to inefficiency, corruption and cronyism), and most of the jobs were given him by his late colleagues. The offices were above a cafe in front of Victoria Station, at the extreme western end of Victoria Street. This was very significant, Victoria Street in the Victorian and Edwardian era was the location of all the great civil engineers who built Britain and the Empire's railways; bridges; tunnels; roads. It still retained in the civil engineering community a remnant, an echo, of this greatness; it was still apparently desirable to have an address in Victoria Street. But that was the other posh end, near Parliament, so one could ensure the smooth passing of the enabling Bills, not a mile away by a crummy bus station. But G Alan, when establishing his practice, was desperate for a Victoria Street address, even if it was the wrong end. I guess he presumed no one would know.
He was a pernickety martinet, who obviously felt antipathy to architects and took every opportunity to put them down - a huge inferiority complex. The 'G' caused endless problems, you would phone up a supplier, they would ask the name, you would say “G Alan Herbert” and they would say “What?” and you would have to spend time explaining - very often it took three attempts. He had a middle aged female office manager/book keeper who radiated hostility and suspicion – she was probably his mistress. All in all it was a very unhappy experience and a mistake, and I left after exactly one year.
But the jobs were interesting, the PSA looked after the government estate – the museums; royal palaces; Parliament; Whitehall. One had to go to the 'DoE Plan Room', which was somewhere in Elephant and Castle, to get copies of the original plans, which were fascinating. I got into hidden areas and onto roofs of the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Houses of Parliament and the Faraday House Citadel telephone exchange bunker.
But the atmosphere was poisonous. Years later I attempted to find out what happened to him, the firm disappears soon after I left.
January 1976 - May 1976 Howell Killick Partridge Amis
A prestigious firm working on Plymouth's nuclear submarine refitting base. The end of my architectural career - as described in 'Why I Am Not An Architect': https://www.xenophon.org.uk/bbiog_architect.html. Basically Amis, or was it Partridge, made it clear he didn't think I was suited to the reality of being an architect, and I was inclined to accept his opinion. I did gain a pseudo girlfriend Susan https://www.xenophon.org.uk/biog_susan.html who also worked there, but that was a mistake also!
May 1976 – July 1977 Unemployment
'On the Dole' – an interesting experience. I spent the time researching the Victorian engineer Thomas Webster Rammell and his Pneumatic Railway, see https://www.xenophon.org.uk/rammell.html.
But after a year I thought “If I don't get a job, I never will” so I answered an advertisement in the 'Kensington News and Post' for a Land Use Surveyor in the Town Planning department of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.
July 1977 - June 2007 The Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea
The Greater London Council, in annual Private Acts of Parliament, was enabled to mandate the London Boroughs to carry out work on its behalf. It decided that in order to produce the London Plan it needed a land use and employment survey of the whole of Greater London. This was an enormous task. Every property had to have its centroid digitised and the site and ground floor area measured from 1:1,250 Ordnance Survey maps, and then it was visited and the proportion of the ground floor of each floor, and the proportion of each floor of each use was estimated, the employment of each use and various other parameters were noted. This was all entered on a card for each property, which were input into a mainframe database 'CLUSTER '. (Central Land Use and Employment Register) It took 3 surveyors 4? years; and then was updated every 5 years 3 times. In 2023 I enquired of the then London City Hall what had happened to the data - no one knew.
It was quite a nice job. You were out in the open air on your own exploring the Borough (I lived in Kensington) and I have always liked ferreting into places and information not normally available to the public. And I learnt to input and query a main-frame database.
The job was initially temporary, then it was made permanent. I had intended to stay a year or so, but Local Government is quite relaxed and initially it was quite a cultural shock after an architect's office, where tasks were actually wanted and results used for something useful. The job slowly evolved into the more interesting areas of demography and geographic information systems on networked personal computers. Basically I created my own job. The years went by; and Berthe https://www.xenophon.org.uk/biog_bertha.html; the CLUSTER database was abandoned; the tens of thousands of record cards were thrown away and 30 years later I found myself retiring in 2007. I may write something in the future on my years in K&C, but it is getting a bit recent and the participants are still alive.
I believe the purpose of life is to change reality - nothing I did at K&C changed reality. All in all it was basically humiliating and a mistake.