McMorran & Whitby – Architecture, Conflict and Humanity

by Edward Denison

Humanity is not a word commonly associated with architecture, but 'humanism' is what inspired one of London's most significant but little-known architectural practices of the twentieth century, a period characterised by architectural dogmatism. McMorran & Whitby sought to design, as one friend put it, 'buildings related to human beings – in an age in which human values and the human scale are at a discount' (Raymond Cochran in a letter to Margaret McMorran, 29 October 1965). Having recently written a book about the firm, headed by Donald McMorran (1904-65) and George Whitby (1916-73), I believe this quest is as urgent today as at any time during the last century.

The book, McMorran & Whitby, is part of a pioneering series on post-war British architects by RIBA Publishers in partnership with English Heritage and the Twentieth Century Society. The opportunity to investigate the history of this extraordinary and undervalued firm was a very exciting one, partly because Donald McMorran was my grandfather, but more importantly because it offered the chance to explore or reassess the idea of humanism in the built environment in an age where cities, despite their incontestable popularity, are seen by many as anything but humane.

McMorran & Whitby's origins go back to 1907 when the architect and truest of gentlemen, Horace Farquharson (1874-1966), leased the offices at 14 North Audley Street in Mayfair. It was from here that the three generations represented by Farquharson, McMorran and Whitby would work over seven decades defined by the ascendancy of modernism, pursuing what fellow architect, Emmanuel Vincent Harris (1876-1971), sympathetically referred to as the 'hard road' (private correspondence from Vincent Harris to Donald McMorran).

McMorran started working with Farquharson in 1921, when studying at Regent Street Polytechnic. After a period working in Harris's practice, McMorran rejoined Farquharson in 1935 to design a Metropolitan Police station and section house on Blackheath Road, Greenwich, which won an RIBA Bronze Medal. Sir Lancelot Keay, President of the RIBA, praised it for being 'a piece of excellent planning', daring people to 'play with [it] with some set-squares' to see 'why it is right, because of its perfect proportions' (Keay's comments in awarding RIBA Bronze Medal for the best Metropolitan building erected in the decade up to the end of 1946 to Farquharson and McMorran: quoted in The Builder, 14 November 1947, p. 541). Today, this very fine building that Keay observed as being 'not too traditional to upset the modernists and not too modern to upset the traditionalists', stands empty and unused.

Around the same time, the pair narrowly missed the opportunity to design a new police station in Marylebone, the design of which provided the basis for the new police station in Hammersmith in 1937. McMorran's elevation of Hammersmith police station, determined by the 'golden mean' (where every element of the facade is mathematically determined), presents a dignified and humane air described in the professional press as an 'atmosphere of friendliness' (The Architect and Building News, 29 March 1940, p. 303). Rumour has it that on the night of the building's inauguration, Whitby, then a student at Regent Street Polytechnic and working part-time for Farquharson & McMorran, sought arrest so as to be the first to spend a night in the cells. Hammersmith police station received wide acclaim. The architect Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel (1887-1959) regarded it 'aesthetically nearly perfect' and 'the best thing of its kind in London' ("Nightingales and Mud", Time and Tide, 29 March 1947, p. 292). An obituarist later claimed this 'exquisite police station' was 'the best building that never got a London Architecture Medal' (The Builder, 13 August 1965, p. 331) but behind the building's facade and the praise it attracted was a reinforced concrete frame designed to withstand possible aerial bombardment in a looming war.

During the Second World War, Whitby signed up and served in North Africa and the Middle East, while Farquharson and McMorran served on St Paul's Watch, a group committed to the defence of the City's great Cathedral. McMorran also worked on the designs for the top-secret Mulberry Harbour, the transportable harbour used during the Normandy landings.

After the war, Farquharson & McMorran were extremely busy. In London alone they worked on housing estates, schools and more police stations. They designed estates between Parkhill and Upper Park Roads (1949) and Fellows Road (1947) in Hampstead, a modern tower block in Poplar (1953), a new Metropolitan Police section house (1951) on Mare Street, Hackney, and the 'Bow Road Open-Air School' (now Phoenix School, 1952) for the London County Council (LCC), which won a London Architecture Bronze Medal.

Independently, Whitby designed his first major project, a seven-storey cruciform tower for Plashet County [contents of page 17 below] Secondary School for Girls in East Ham (1954), before returning to 14 North Audley Street and later becoming a partner to Farquharson & McMorran. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, McMorran & Whitby were involved in some of London's most important developments. As Assessor to the Golden Lane Estate in 1952, McMorran awarded the project to Geoffrey Powell (later of Chamberlin, Powell and Bon), who went on to design the neighbouring Barbican. McMorran also prepared designs for the extension of the National Gallery (1958) and St Paul's Choir School (1959) in the City, neither of which were built, though his facade for Rudolph Palumbo at 100 Pall Mall (1962) was erected.

The practice's enduring relationship with the City of London Corporation began in 1955 with the elegant Lammas Green housing estate (1957) on Sydenham Hill, (they also designed housing estates on Holloway Road (1965 & 1975) and the York Way Housing Estate (1973) for the City Corporation), but their pre-eminent projects for the City were the Police Headquarters on Wood Street and the extension to the Central Criminal Court on Old Bailey.

Wood Street Police Station, an Italian palazzo in the heart of London serving the needs of a nuclear age, is considered by many to be McMorran & Whitby's best work. Behind the beautifully composed and humane exterior was a modern police station whose squash courts in the basement doubled as a communications centre in the event of nuclear war. McMorran & Whitby's masterpiece was not only designed to meet the threat of unimaginable terror, but in architectural terms its Renaissance-inspired appearance fanned the flames of conflict between modernists and their adversaries.

While the architectural press either ignored or derided it, McMorran's friend and the government's Chief Inspector of Factories, Brian Harvey, wrote, 'It is the best I have seen of your work. It stands amidst its neighbours like a Wren church in a slum, an accusing monument of what a whole city might have looked like had there been any vision' (letter to Donald McMorran, 4 April 1965). The critic, Ian Nairn spoke of its 'naughty rustication' and the twelve-storey tower being a 'ferocious explosion of stonework with creepy overtones' ("Architecture against Crime", The Observer, 14 August 1966); sentiments echoed by the Architects' Journal who criticised its 'anachronistic rusticated chimneys and mock loadbearing stonework', while conceding that it was 'in another class from commercial trash nearby' (6 July 1966, p. 6).

At Wood Street, McMorran bequeathed to London one of the world's most dignified classical high-rises, but it was a decision he did not take lightly. Acutely aware of the impact of high-rise buildings in cities, he believed they could be 'put into good effect, in isolated cases'. 'It is important to consider', he said in a letter to The Times, 'what the result will be if this type of development is generally applied to a compact neighbourhood such as the City of London' (letter to The Times, 4 June 1953). If developers cannot be assisted to limit their demands on space and light (which would allow the City to remain a genial place) then 'leave St. Paul's and the church towers behind, make the sky the limit, and enjoy the different pleasures offered by twentieth-century architecture and planning. But do not expect compromise to produce anything but dreary mediocrity' (letter to The Times, 27 January 1954). These are not the words of an arch-conservative.

McMorran died before Wood Street Police Station was officially opened, leaving Whitby in charge of its completion as well as the Central Criminal Court, which was in its early design stages but which he completed superbly in 1972. Described by one critic as 'well ahead of its time in the abandonment of modernist conventions, not for the new vernacular, but for a far more coherent and radical style' (Brian Appleyard, "From God's House to Bauhaus and back again", The Times, 20 November 1982), the Central Criminal Court was McMorran & Whitby's most original work, but it received scant recognition in the professional press. Building Design claimed it did 'little justice to architecture old or new' (8 September 1972, p. 7), while the Architects' Journal proposed it looked like a penitentiary with its imagery suggesting 'abandon hope all ye who enter here' (6 September 1972, p. 516). Both failed to see that humanity was permitted by the very 'avoidance of any grand entrance' (Appleyard, ibid.), which Whitby deliberately designed to provide a 'more intimate, human and informal atmosphere' (The Times, 1 September 1972). The IRA detonated a massive car bomb outside this entrance on the 8 March 1973. The cliff-face of Portland stone survived almost without a scratch while the glass curtain walling of nearby modern buildings, such as 'that dreadful building by Theo Birks on the opposite side of Old Bailey', as Sir John Betjeman described it in a letter to Charmian Whitby (14 March 1973), was shattered.

From the relative triviality of architectural politics to the potential of nuclear holocaust, the IRA's act of terrorism was just one of many different conflicts that McMorran & Whitby's work encountered as it sought a humane architecture. In a peculiar way, the production of this book has witnessed a continuation of these struggles as they have evolved into new forms. Trivially, the reappraisal of McMorran & Whitby's work in an age of post-Postmodernism has in some circles reignited doctrinaire debates about 'isms', but far more serious is the regularity and manner in which I was accosted by police, emboldened by the new stop and search laws, for undertaking my research and photography. The unhappiest of these incidents resulted in my being detained under Prevention of Terrorism Act while photographing McMorran's marvellous Hammersmith Police station, a full account of which can be found online.

If it was not so grave, I would have laughed at the palpable irony of being detained under the pretext of terrorism for photographing a building that my grandfather deliberately designed to appear friendly and humane to the public whom it served, while also preparing it for a conflict against Nazi aggressors whose security forces were on the brink of engaging in some of the most inhumane acts of the twentieth century. When the very people charged with your protection detain and suspect you for going about your business, you are left feeling exposed, disoriented and fearful. It has made me ponder the thin line that exists in Britain today between freedom and oppression, and, as a result of an unhealthy obsession with fear, mourn the decline of the uniquely exhilarating experience a city offers. McMorran & Whitby taught me, through architecture's dialectic with society, more than I had expected about humanity, which, I am left feeling, could benefit us all.

© Edward Denison 2010

About the author

Edward Denison is a heritage consultant, writer and architectural photographer. His work for various international organisations in places as diverse as Africa, China and Europe regularly features in print, electronic and broadcast media internationally. Near to completing a PhD in Architectural History at UCL, he has published several definitive studies, including McMorran & Whitby (RIBA, 2009), Modernism in China - Architectural Visions and Revolutions (Wiley, 2008), Building Shanghai - The Story of China's Gateway (Wiley, 2006) and Asmara - Africa's Secret Modernist City (Merrell, 2003).

Concept sketch by Donald McMorran for Parkhill Road flats, Hampstead, 1946 (copyright McMorran Family Archive)

Housing Estate, Parkhill Road, Hampstead (McMorran & Whitby, 1946-9) (photograph copyright Edward Denison 2009)

Hammersmith Police Station (McMorran & Whitby, 1938-9) (photograph copyright Edward Denison 2009)

Sketch by Donald McMorran showing the facade proportions, Hammersmith Police Station, 1938 (copyright McMorran Family Archive)