DISCOVER LONDON66 discoverbritainmag.comARCAID IMAGES/ALAMY/ THE CECIL BEATON STUDIO ARCHIVEtime. It was completed in 1929 for the
Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company to a
design by its company architect, Albert
Moore. Liebig wanted to include a tower
featuring illuminated signs that advertised
the name of the company’s beef stock cubes,
Oxo. When planning permission for such
a brash commercial vulgarity was refused,
the Oxo Tower had on all sides a set of
three vertically-aligned windows, each of
which happened to be in the shape of a
circle, a cross and a circle. The bright white
Hoover Building on London’s A40 was not
completed until 1933 but is another shining
example of industrial 1920s Art Deco, in
this case a geometric structure embellished
with quasi-Egyptian features and vibrant
colours around the entrance.
On the corner of Great Marlborough and
Argyll Streets in Soho, Ideal House was
designed in the “Egyptian” Art Deco style,
with a polished black granite exterior andgold, green and orange embellishments.
This sleek, seven-storey building opened
in 1929 as a showroom for the National
Radiator Company. Tellingly, its design was
copied from the company’s larger building
in New York. But the British did find their
own ways of being modern.
With its dramatic lines, the Battersea
Power Station, begun in 1929, is one of
London’s best-known buildings. Designed
as a machine that looked like a machine,
the coal-fired power station once supplied
the city with one-fifth of its electricity,
while today it is being redeveloped into
shops, flats and more, with the four iconic
white towers remaining in place.
As for the art of the time, writers like
Anthony Powell and Nancy Mitford
recorded what it was like to live through the
1920s, but no one defined the decade better
than Evelyn Waugh. The author’s comic
1928 masterpiece Decline and Fall gavehim enough money to marry, briefly and
unhappily. The sequel, Vile Bodies, written
the following year and filmed in 2003 as
Bright Young Things, was one of the books
that exposed the heavy drinking and
drug-fuelled sexual experimentation of the
1920s. In fact, “Bright Young Things” was
a pejorative nickname given by the tabloid
press to a group of Bohemian socialites
who threw elaborate fancy-dress parties
in 1920s London and generally behaved
in a self-consciously wicked way. Cecil
Beaton began his career as a photographer
documenting this racy set.
More soberly, in Bloomsbury Square,
Virginia Woolf was developing the
modernist novel at this time with books
such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse,
and Orlando, the latter a parodic biography
of a young nobleman who lives for three
centuries without ageing beyond 30. Her
frequent house-guest TS Eliot had alreadyDISCOVER LONDON66 discoverbritainmag.comARCAID IMAGES/ALAMY/ THE CECIL BEATON STUDIO ARCHIVE
time. It was completed in 1929 for the
Liebig’s Extract of Meat Company to a
design by its company architect, Albert
Moore. Liebig wanted to include a tower
featuring illuminated signs that advertised
the name of the company’s beef stock cubes,
Oxo. When planning permission for such
a brash commercial vulgarity was refused,
the Oxo Tower had on all sides a set of
three vertically-aligned windows, each of
which happened to be in the shape of a
circle, a cross and a circle. The bright white
Hoover Building on London’s A40 was not
completed until 1933 but is another shining
example of industrial 1920s Art Deco, in
this case a geometric structure embellished
with quasi-Egyptian features and vibrant
colours around the entrance.
On the corner of Great Marlborough and
Argyll Streets in Soho, Ideal House was
designed in the “Egyptian” Art Deco style,
with a polished black granite exterior andgold, green and orange embellishments.
This sleek, seven-storey building opened
in 1929 as a showroom for the National
Radiator Company. Tellingly, its design was
copied from the company’s larger building
in New York. But the British did find their
own ways of being modern.
With its dramatic lines, the Battersea
Power Station, begun in 1929, is one of
London’s best-known buildings. Designed
as a machine that looked like a machine,
the coal-fired power station once supplied
the city with one-fifth of its electricity,
while today it is being redeveloped into
shops, flats and more, with the four iconic
white towers remaining in place.
As for the art of the time, writers like
Anthony Powell and Nancy Mitford
recorded what it was like to live through the
1920s, but no one defined the decade better
than Evelyn Waugh. The author’s comic
1928 masterpiece Decline and Fall gavehim enough money to marry, briefly and
unhappily. The sequel, Vile Bodies, written
the following year and filmed in 2003 as
Bright Young Things, was one of the books
that exposed the heavy drinking and
drug-fuelled sexual experimentation of the
1920s. In fact, “Bright Young Things” was
a pejorative nickname given by the tabloid
press to a group of Bohemian socialites
who threw elaborate fancy-dress parties
in 1920s London and generally behaved
in a self-consciously wicked way. Cecil
Beaton began his career as a photographer
documenting this racy set.
More soberly, in Bloomsbury Square,
Virginia Woolf was developing the
modernist novel at this time with books
such as Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse,
and Orlando, the latter a parodic biography
of a young nobleman who lives for three
centuries without ageing beyond 30. Her
frequent house-guest TS Eliot had already