New Scotland Yard

Extract

The history of the building of New Scotland Yard (Fig. 31a), the most important public work of architecture of its date in London, is dominated by two men: the architect Richard Norman Shaw and the then Receiver for the Metropolitan Police District, Alfred Richard Pennefather. Both were at the height of their professions at the time of building. In 1887 Shaw, a senior Royal Academician, was already an acknowledged giant among Victorian architects. Of his great country houses, Dawpool, Cheshire, was completed and Bryanston, Dorset, not yet begun. Pennefather’s term of office as Receiver from 1883 to his retirement and knighthood in 1909 spanned the two stages of the Yard’s development, from its conception and the opening of the north block to the completion of the south block in 1907. He is revealed, in the Home Office papers now in the Public Record Office, as a man determined, against official prejudice, delay and opposition, to erect an architectural monument for the police worthy of its purpose - to accommodate a rapidly expanding force - and its position on one of the grandest sites in London. New Scotland Yard is perhaps as much his achievement as it is the culminating masterpiece of Shaw’s life.