Old in name, but not in nature

Six years ago, the Government sold the War Office– Sir Winston Churchill’s former haunt and the heart of First and Second World War logistics–on a 250-year lease. On the eve of its rebirth as a luxury hotel, Clive Aslet looks back its extraordinary history

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WHEN The Old War Office opens this winter, guests will find themselves sleeping in one of the landmarks of Edwardian Whitehall. Opened as Britain’s centre of military operations in 1907, its architecture is an opulent if slightly chaotic composition of columns, arches, rusticated masonry and corner turrets, bursting with splendid self-assurance: the equivalent of a military fanfare or grand review of the Fleet.

Here was an Imperial fanfare. Here were marble staircases, oak panelling and internal walls that required as much as 50 acres of plaster to cover them. On the music-hall stage, the cross-dressing singer Vesta Tilley sang Jolly Good Luck to the Girl who Loves a Soldier. The army was popular; so, with what the Daily Mail called the ‘usually unresponsive man on the street’, was the War Office.

Some thought that the architect, William Young, had been appointed as the result of a government fix, as his name was not on the list of likely candidates that had been requested from the Royal Institute of British Architects. He was, however, an appropriate choice, knowing the requirements of turn-of-the-century administrative buildings from the Glasgow City Chambers. The War Office took his cue from the adjacent Banqueting House and the cornices of the two buildings align. But Inigo Jones’s courtly Classicism was too restrained for the burgeoning Age of Empire, which called for domes and allegorical sculpture, bombast and Baroque.