This book documents a fascinating episode in the development of London's government quarter. Jointly written by an architect and a political historian, it examines the ambitious scheme for replanning the area between the bottom of Whitehall and Parliament Square, where it was proposed to replace the grand Victorian Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Government Buildings nearby (the present Treasury Building) with a tight-knit complex of offices arranged in tiers around courtyards and connected by walkways and bridges. One of these, spanning Parliament Street, led south to a new riverside terrace and buildings; another, to the west, connected the government quarter with Parliament Square, where a new conference centre was planned to replace the Middlesex Guildhall.

This book analyses the scheme not simply in terms of approaches to architecture and urban planning current in the 1960s, but also in relation to the modernizing agenda of the government of the day. On both counts, it is remarkably illuminating, and helps to overturn some common assumptions about post-war politics, post-war architecture and the connections between the two. Although Harold Wilson – who coined the phrase ‘White Heat’ in 1963 – enjoys a reputation as an exponent of modernization and of technological progress, the idea fell victim to the economic and political difficulties which subsequently beset his government. Wilson himself appears far less concerned with matters of architecture and planning than his Conservative predecessors. Indeed, the idea of replanning Whitehall, and the wholescale demolitions which this entailed, was actually initiated under Harold Macmillan, whose decision it was to demolish the Foreign Office and commission Leslie Martin, recently appointed Professor of Architecture at Cambridge, to design a scheme to replace it. Martin's work, characterized by its scientific rigour and solutions based on methodical research and analysis, was in 1976 dubbed ‘The architecture of Stalinism’ by Roger Scruton. That phrase mischievously evokes a compact between socialist government and megalomaniac modern designer. But not only does this book reveal Macmillan and his foreign secretary (and subsequently successor) Alec Douglas Home to be the keener modernizers, but it also presents Martin as a subtler and more sensitive urban designer than his own publications suggest. We see him concerned to re-think cities as containing traffic-free precincts, places where the public realm existed alongside the domain of politicians and civil servants. Intriguingly, it suggests that just as Wilson retreated from the ‘White Heat’ concept, Martin espoused a more nuanced approach than that of the Centre for Land Use and Built Form Studies which he founded. This book thus provides a fresh view of a major post-war architect together with a case-study of the Wilson government's growing ambivalence about planning and redevelopment and the creeping sympathy for conservation issues, evident in the buildings of present-day Whitehall.

It would have been richer still had it placed this episode within the longer history of the area. Michael Port's Imperial London (Yale University Press, 1995) has analysed the debates which raged around the design and construction of the new government quarter in Whitehall during the 1850s and 1860s, and it offers some striking parallels in terms of ambitious planning and political controversy. The tussle between ‘pride and parsimony’, between the concern to present an impressive face to the world and the fear of antagonizing the electorate by overspending, is a perennial problem in public building projects. In the 1850s, in the aftermath of the Crimean War and the Indian Mutiny, there was pressure to reorganize government offices in the interests of administrative efficiency. The 1960s scheme was fuelled by a comparable demand for efficiency, something to which Martin's approach, based on rigorous research and analysis of function, seemed well-suited. But other factors were also at stake. In the competitive political landscape of the nineteenth century, providing a capital city with buildings worthy of a great imperial power was essential. A hundred years later, as the Empire was dissolving, inventing a different identity for Britain seemed vital. In the 1960s, diplomats complained that the Foreign Office was leaky, squalid and overcrowded. I would suggest that the grandiose character of its reception rooms and staircase where visiting heads of state and foreign ambassadors were received was equally problematic. In an era of decolonization, Sigismund Goetz's murals of Britannia Pacifatrix on the grand staircase struck an inappropriately triumphalist note. These interiors need describing and illustrating, and the exteriors of the buildings require far better-quality images than are provided here in order to document Victorian Whitehall and demonstrate the complex factors – functional and political and symbolic – which helped to make the case for demolishing it one hundred years later.