Alan Powers on Parliament Square
Does nobody love Parliament Square? Days before the Mayoral election, Tristram Hunt called it a ‘terrible place: inaccessible, ugly, polluted and grotty’ in the Guardian. When the Mayor of London cancelled the scheme for pedestrianising at least two of the roads around the square within days of his election, there was dismay that the still-unpublished plans for its improvement should be abandoned. If the proceedings within the Palace of Westminster are sometimes absurd, this parallel drama on the street outside was equal in sound and fury.
Could commentators distinguish between the square itself and the traffic that circulates around it? Hunt failed to look beyond the three-lane roadways, and, like the members of the ‘World Squares for All’ panel who first raised the question of remodelling in 1996, shifted the problem onto the trees, statues and grass without looking more closely at what is there. Nobody named its designer, or mentioned that it is not only in a Conservation Area but part of a World Heritage Site, apart from the local amenity society, the Thorney Island Society. Such confusion is far from unique, and the cost of major interventions to solve such non-problems is too easily forgotten.
A little history could help. Parliament Square was created in its first form in 1806, by clearing buildings in front of the Palace and the Abbey, and remodelled in 1868 by the architect E. M. Barry, as an unequal pair of traffic islands divided by a road. The wartime Abercrombie-Forshaw Plan for London suggested turning the area into a traffic-free precinct, and the Architectural Review published some seductive drawings with cafés and striped awnings by Gordon Cullen in 1947 to show how the square could become a civic centre for London, but this was too radical for the LCC and Westminster City Council, who were obliged to work together with the Ministry of Works in anticipation of crowds thronging to the Festival of Britain on the South Bank.
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