Wood Street Police Station Building Sights

BBC

Four Collections -

archive programmes chosen by experts.

For this collection, Janet Street-Porter has selected

programmes about Post-War Architecture.

More programmes on this theme, and other BBC Four Collections,

are available on BBC iPlayer.

The old joke goes -

"I say, I say, I say, at what address does a policeman live?"

And the answer is, he lives at Letsby Avenue.

But - I say, I say, I say,

where does a City of London policeman live?

And the answer is - he lives in a neoclassical Italian palazzo.

You get a better class of criminal round here.

It's big stuff. It's fraud. It's international.

It's not blags plotted out in The Dog and Duck.

It's scams worked out over a glass of Chardonnay in wine bars.

It's big stuff.

DOOR CREAKS

It's bigger in every way.

If this were Venice, you'd moor your gondola here.

Ciao! Ciao!

When I first walked round this building, I thought,

"This is really a joke.

"This is a police station that looks like an Italian palace."

And then I later found out that that's precisely what McMorran

intended, and apparently he laughed while he was designing it.

He's designed a police station which looks like an Italian palace,

and you can see that there are sort of echoes of the classical tradition.

The lower floors, which were where the lesser orders and the stores

would have been, are quite small.

And then you look up and you see the big, grand windows

which is like, in an Italian palace, would be the "piano nobile".

There's the granite skirting, then there's Doric stonework.

All the details on this building are really beautiful,

they're very simple.

And they're all in the stonework.

I like this door because I like the beading round it.

It's just very plain and well cut,

and the door itself is very robust,

and also very beautifully designed.

And round the corner there's a bit that looks like a dovecot,

which is actually part of the ventilation system.

It's a very simple,

restrained and elegant building.

It's got an air of permanence.

It's got a lot of class. It's got breeding.

It looks like the house of an aristocrat,

and at the very least it should be the headquarters of an Italian bank.

But it's not.

BURST OF TALK ON POLICE RADIO

Oh! A museum!

Skeleton keys...old uniforms...

and whistles.

And a mustard bomb in a mustard tin -

a-BOMB-inable!

This horse is Polish.

And I think he's been introduced to Lech Walesa.

His name's Nobby.

The only word I know in Polish is "cabbage".

Kapuska! Kapuska!

Kapuska! Kapuska!

When this was first built, people were really condescending about it.

It wasn't modern enough, it's not a glass box.

That was the hour of the tower block and everybody believed in them,

like a religion.

And everywhere, there were enormous erections going up.

McMorran did give us a tower block, but a very little one.

"Mine's bigger than yours!"

From this facade,

the tower looks like a bell tower,

and in fact you'd expect to see some bells up in those niches,

but it's not a bell tower, it's a high-rise.

And similarly, these chimneys aren't really chimneys,

they're part of the ventilation system.

There are other things in this building

which aren't quite what they seem.

Apparently, there are squash courts in the basement

whose walls fold down and become a sort of emergency centre.

This is Fraud Squad.

Cor!

This is the holiest of holies!

You wouldn't expect to find all this technology

inside an Italian palace.

You'd expect them to be watching The Borgias,

and listening to Monteverdi,

and chucking pheasant bones over their shoulders.

MAN: Like every other surface, the lights collect dust,

which gives a cleaning problem.

And it's much finer particles, so that gives you a problem, as well.

It's not a dust you can dust off, it's got to be cleaned off.

You've got all that surface area on those globes.

I think the difficulty is that you've got to get up there

and change those bulbs when they go, and that's a practical problem..

MAN 2: Yeah, that is a maintenance problem that we have.

It's an ideal surface

for dances, or whatever.

Wood Street makes the surrounding buildings

look rather...rather flashy, rather parvenu.

Apart from their sheer size,

they're covered in a plethora of different materials.

It's rather like comparing a Jean Muir suit,

which is all cut and hang and timeless elegance,

with a high-fashion Christian Lacroix,

they've got gold buttons on, and bits of braid and lots of pockets.

It's a very posh cop shop!