The Dorchester The site of the Dorchester hotel was purchased by Sir Robert McAlpine & Sons and Gordon Hotels Ltd. in 1926. The two companies commissioned Sir Owen Williams and then William Curtis Green to design a new hotel on…
Tag: architecture
Inspired by my recent obsession with watching old episodes of Agatha Christie’s Poirot, set in the 1930s, I decided to take a self-guided tour of some of the best examples of Art Deco architecture in central London. The first thing…
The complex of buildings found at Westminster is a little architecturally confusing. We have Westminster Abbey, clearly old from what you see inside it, Westminster Hall and the Palace of Westminster, which look similar, and Big Ben, which screams Victoriana. These buildings can easily blend together if you don’t look carefully and that blending was indeed the intention of the designers.
I must have walked down Whitehall a hundred times, past one stone façade after another, and not realised that such an important building lay just beside me. I knew about the old Palace of Whitehall, which was a key royal…