Frank Salmon: I’m Frank Salmon I’m an architectural historian and a senior lecturer at the department of History of Art. My recent research has been about the houses of parliament and specifically the unbuilt designs that were produced in the 1730s by an architect called William Kent.
We do in fact have examples of William Kent’s public architecture that survives today. The Treasury building on Whitehall and the Horseguards building also on Whitehall. The two buildings face each other at right angles and in one case the Treasury building are still fulfilling a function in British Government as that building now serves as the Cabinet Office. These buildings are perhaps a familiar image to some people because of the palladian architecture that they exemplify. Familiar to us now but this is an architecture that William Kent and his mentor Richard Boyle third Earl of Burlington were very much instrumental in creating for us in the eighteenth century. By the early 1730s, Lord Burlington had fallen out of favour with a leading politician of the day, Sir Robert Walpole, but Kent although he continued to live in Burlingtons own house now had Warpole as his patron. He had been working on the interiors of Walpole's house at Holkham Hall in Norfolk for many years. He was also commissioned by Walpole to convert the three houses in Downing St into the 10 Downing St that we have today as the prime ministerial residence. It was doubtless Robert Walpole who saw Kent as the means by which he could achieve public architecture that reflected the modernity and forward looking nature of his government as he saw it. William Kent’s parliament building was not of course constructed but he did leave a legacy for us in the form of some eighty or so drawings showing the complicated sequence of design ideas through the 1730s and into the 1740s. And its from these sources that in my research i have been trying to reconstruct the history of the project and this is obviously important in and of itself as a piece of history. But there is a current topicality to the subject, in that the present Houses of Parliament are due for major refurbishment and this raises some interesting questions about the nature of the design of our national legislature.
Narrator: In Kent’s day the Houses of Commons, situated inside St Stephen’s Chapel, had been fitted up by Sir Christopher Wren in 1692 with balconies extended after the 1707 act of union had included 45 additional Scottish MP’s. The House of Lords was a still more an inadequate room. In March 1773 when the King came to visit the house, it was described by one contemporary as crowded to insupportable degree. Already in 1732 there had been calls for erecting an ediphis that may be made use of the reception of the parliament in connection with plans to build a new home for the public records and for the library given to the nation by Sir Robert Cotton.
The 1732 plans were evidently made by Nicholas Hawksmoor associated with the late Baroque architecture of Wren. By March 1733 Hawksmoor had been ousted by Burlington who had proposed a building for the two Houses of Parliament at catatonia Library, estimated to cost £30,000 pounds. Burrlington’s elevation, drawn by Kent, was for a building 427 feet wide with a row of twenty gigantic carinthian columns each towering to 40 feet and the rooftop covered in statury. We must assume that this front faced West to Old Palace Yard, since the great flight of steps 160 feet wide would not have been required on the River Thames front. Also there appear to be six entrances in the basement for carriages or sedan chairs, three on the Lords side and three on the Commons side. But within two months of making this design Burrlington fell out with Walpole and withdrew from public life. For all its grandeur, the potentialy drafty colonnade and huge windows made this an impractical design. When Kent took over the project he started to ameliorate some of the problems he perceived in Burlington's design. He removed the windy steps leaving the colonnade now of the composite order as a first floor logia for pleasant evenings and giving the central six columns a pediment. Kent retained Burlington’s use of the dome of the pantheon and this first phase of his design work for a new parliament house can thus be called the pantheon scheme. The plans associated with Kent’s largest elevations in the pantheon scheme for the parliament house show how the building would have functioned. The original straight colonnade can now be seen to have transferred to the river front whilst old palace yard there is a new elliptical colonnade that we do not see on any other surviving elevation drawing people into the western side of the building. The stairs on the North House of Common side, led to a new court of requests. Its remarkable that Kent included a new space for this medieval and Tudor poor mans court of summary legal redress since the court had ceased to function almost a century before during the civil war. The plan shows how Kent established a central access between Commons and Lords 444 feet wide. When six doors were opened, speaker and King could face one another through 5 intervening rooms almost 150 yards apart. Its with the catatonia Library in Kent’s pantheon scheme for the parliament building that we get a rare glimpse inside one of his proposals.
Frank Salmon: Kent’s redesign for the House of Lords of 1735 gives us a brief insight in the sequence of drawings to his tendency to doodle on drawings and to the theatricality that he enjoyed so much.
Narrator: He recorded a visit made to Parliament by King George II. In a wonderful sketch we see the Monarchs seated accompanied by aristocrats holding the Sword of State and the Cap of Maintenance while the Great Chamberlain clutches his staff of office. Kent’s design would have doubled the width and raised the height of the old House of Lords but it does not seem to have been part of the overall scheme for rebuilding parliament, probably it relates to the discussions of a committee setup in 1735 to consider the order and methods to be observed in this house when his Majesty comes here. Surmounting the octagonal hall behind the Old Palace Yard facade of this second scheme is an eight faceted dome derived from that of Lord Burlington’s recently completed villa at Chiswick for which reason this second parliament scheme of Kent’s might be labeled the Chiswick Scheme.
By March of 1739 however Kent had already begun planning a third and very different design for the new parliament house see in this sight plan. The building was to be sited East of all the parliament buildings perhaps so these historic structures could be preserved or more likely to avoid disruption of governmental activity while the new building was being erected. By August 1739 this plan had been developed to the point at which it was submitted to the treasury for approval. Rising above the central octagonal lobby was the new dominating feature of this third phase of Kent’s parliament designs, a huge tower rising as much as 160 feet into the Westminster sky. On top of the tower was a temple like structure probably derived from Paladio’s reconstruction of the Temple of Fortune near Rome. With portico’s providing views over London in all four directions, so this design might be called the belvedere scheme. The belvedere looks odd and disproportionate in elevation, but by this time Kent was a master of spacial and dramatical elements in landscape design. He knew the building would have been seen in perspective and in accusation with the spiky towers of Westminster Abbey, St john Smith Square and St Stephens Chapel. In August of 1739 Kent made five suggestions for the seating arrangement in the House of Commons. Its fascinating that the one actually proposed as ‘the most commodious’ was asymmetrical preserving the canted benches of Wrens 1692 existing chamber only behind the speaker on his right.
This may be seen as a physical embodiment of Warpole’s reduction of the Privy Council or Lords of Confidence to small cabinet style government. Walpole’s premiership was entering its endgame, his peace policy in disarray and the war of the Austrian succession about to breakout. It was against this background that Kent made a final attempt to salvage something of his vision for the new Parliament house, probably during early 1740 or 1741. The conservation of existing fabric and the lack of encroachment into the river were doubtless intended to cut construction costs. This was entirely a pragmatic design with the new spaces fitted around the old rather than conceived as part of a grand plan. The old palace yard front of Kent’s final Law Court design for the front of Parliament House was far more modest than his earlier grandiose visions featuring here a return to the Chiswick dome of Burlington’s villa. Kent must have been aware that his chances of building a parliament building were rapidly receding.
Frank Salmon: So what is the legacy of William Kent for the design for the Parliament House? Well we don’t have the building of course… but we do have a sequence of drawings that show us the brilliance of a man at work in transforming an architectural idiom which was really created for the country house into one that could serve the purposes of governmental, business, administration and bureaucracy.