Swastikas in St James’s – it sounds like the title of a bad political thriller. The truth is more prosaic, and a lot more shocking, piling on further evidence of the tolerance extended to Hitler and his Nazi regime by the British in the lead-up to the second world war.
A new book documenting London’s lost interiors reveals that by 1937, the Germans had spent five million Reichsmark on a refurbishment that would transform their embassy at Carlton House Terrace into a temple to Nazi ideology at the heart of the British establishment.
In one photograph, which the book’s author, architectural historian Steven Brindle, believes was taken shortly after the outbreak of war in 1939, a leather sofa complements the chilly grandeur of an arcade of marble columns, installed next to the upward sweep of a carpeted neo-Rococo staircase.
That carpet warrants a closer look: the border pattern is made up of repeating swastikas installed as part of a scheme designed by none other than Albert Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect.
Carlton House Terrace is one of several impressive if unremarkable streets that slip between the busy thoroughfare of Pall Mall on to The Mall, from where Whitehall is a short walk across St James’s Park via Horse Guards Road and Downing Street, with Buckingham Palace an even shorter distance away in the other direction.
Behind the bulky, classical façade overlooking the park, the terrace is a discreet enclave at the heart of the British state, and since its construction in the early 19th century to designs by John Nash, its stuccoed houses have been home to prime ministers, senior politicians, administrators and industrialists.
The German embassy was an early occupant, and when Joachim von Ribbentrop was appointed as the Third Reich’s ambassador to London in 1936, its grandiose, expansionist plans were reflected in a lavish overhaul, which saw the embassy extended from number 9 through numbers 8 and 7.
Published in London: Lost Interiors, as part of a trove of more than 650 photographs from the archives of Historic England, and London architectural photographers Bedford Lemere, and Millar and Harris, the pictures, including of a marble fireplace embellished with a swastika frieze, appear now as a revelation.
They lend credibility to longstanding rumours of a swastika-patterned wooden floor now concealed under a carpet, and invest the “good German doors” listed by Nikolaus Pevsner in The Buildings of England: London Volume 1, (1957), with a suggestive frisson.
But though Brindle writes that Carlton House Terrace was Speer’s only known work outside Germany, the existence of this Nazi haven was no secret. In fact, the embassy, remodelled in what a New York Times report tactfully described as “modern German style”, and carried out by imported German labour, was unveiled to more than 1,000 “distinguished guests” at a reception on May 14, 1937, among them the Duke and Duchess of Kent, who along with Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor were among Britain’s highest-ranking Nazi sympathisers.
The photographs taken after the closure of the German embassy in 1939 show interiors fitted out with German furniture, which Brindle compares to pieces at the Reich Chancellory and Berchtesgaden; Pevsner notes a handrail of “typical Nazi form”, echoed in fireplaces, door furniture and a central heating grille. He also notes a travertine-lined reception room, and Brindle compares the one photographed at No 7 with Speer’s Reich Chancellory in Berlin.
Slightly out of place in this otherwise coordinated interior are the murals in the ground floor reception rooms, painted by the entirely blameless 19th-century English painter George Frederic Watts, and featured in one of the photographs from 1939.
Brindle explains that the murals, representing classical themes including The Four Elements, were commissioned by Charles Somers-Cocks, 3rd Earl Somers (1819-83) and his wife, Virginia, who lived in No 7 in 1853-4. But, says Brindle, “Ribbentrop and Speer evidently appreciated Watts’ mythic murals with their somewhat Wagnerian character, and incorporated them in their scheme.”
What is clear, both from Pevsner’s 1957 survey, and from Brindle’s book, which includes photographs dated 1964, is that Ribbentrop’s monument to Nazi ideology remained intact long after his trial at Nuremberg – for war crimes and crimes against humanity – and his execution in 1946.
Naturally, the country was too taken up with the war to worry about Nazi gewgaws in the former embassy, but it wasn’t until 1964 that most of Speer’s work was removed, and it was during that work that the second set of photographs were taken.
Even once the war was over, the full horror of the Nazi project took many years to emerge, and still longer to process. But though Ribbentrop was derided by the British press as pompous and blundering, and detested by fellow Nazis, he was taken seriously enough by Hitler, who in 1938 made him foreign minister.
There was certainly no room to be dismissive of Germany’s delegation to Britain, the sinister nature of which was intimated in 1936, following the arrest in Switzerland of Hans Wesemann, a Gestapo agent charged with kidnapping a German-Jewish refugee journalist. According to a report in the New York Times, dated May 6 that year, Wesemann’s confession included a statement confirming that “the German embassy in London had been used as a base for the activities of the Gestapo, Nazi secret state police.”
Looking back now, it was happening in plain sight.
London: Lost Interiors by Steven Brindle is published by Atlantic Publishing in association with Historic England, hardback £50
