Charles Brooking
Major Rescue, Westminster Palace
Hotel, Victoria Street, London SW1
and Buckingam House,
Buckingham Gate, London NW1
The following is one of a series of interviews with Charles Brooking, Historic and Listed Buildings Detail Expert, The Brooking Collection of Architectural Detail and a Surveyor where we have recorded his comments and various aspects that have affected windows and doors and other collectibles. The interviews outline how his collection started and built over the years and gives an insight into the amazing architectural features housed in his fine collection.
Surveyor: Did you rescue any architectural items from London Hotels?
Charles Brooking : Yes. The Westminster Palace Hotel, Victoria Street , London. SW1 which was built in 1859 and was one of the first luxury hotels in London. That was a fantastic rescue, very complex because the site manager there was very difficult. I went with two friends over about three Sundays there and I retrieved staircase balusters, a wealth of ironmongery, some cast iron panels from the main atrium balastrading and a lot of things from the attic. I wasn't covering architrave sections then because obviously it was difficult.
Rescue defined
Charles Brooking defines a rescue as saving a window or door or staircase that would be doomed.
Charles Brooking was a pioneer in the rescue of architectural detailing as many years ago it was very much considered a strange and an unusual past time to want to rescue old parts of buildings with everything new and shiny being so important.
Surveyor: Did you rescue anything from The Buckingham Hotel, London SW1?
Charles Brooking : I think it was Buckingham House originally The Buckingham Hotel in Buckingham Gate. A lovely building, it's in Pevsner. There's lots of ornamental terracotta work of 1907. It never should have been demolished. It was demolished by Pilkin and Price the mid 1970s and I retrieved stained glass windows and some wonderful section staircases.
Surveyor: So the properties were Listed back in those days?
Charles Brooking : I think one or two were Listed. We've managed to get round it but this one was a tragedy; it never should have gone. It was a fantastic building and never would have gone now. Some awful things have happened and if you saw that building you would not believe it. It was disgusting. SAVE, of course, was started then, Marcus Binney was starting his campaign.
Surveyor: Please explain a bit more about SAVE campaign.
Charles Brooking : Well their campaign is to preserve buildings and save them from destruction and to promote correct conservation and conversion. Save did a great deal to save our heritage as they call it now, with the hands of developers and others.
SAVE Britain's Heritage
Created in 1975 by a group wishing to campaign publically for historic buildings that were in danger including architects, historians, planners and journalists. SAVE is an influential conservation group campaigning to save buildings as risk including railway stations, redundant churches and chapels, military buildings, cottages, town halls, country houses etc.
SAVE is sympathetic to the possibilities of using historic buildings for alternative uses often being at the forefront of giving buildings under threat a new lease of life.
The President of SAVE is Marcus Binney CBE the architectural historian and author.
Website: SaveBritainsHeritage.Org
So those were two big sites which weren't easy because getting onto site then was difficult at times. There was none of the Health and Safety which has to be adhered to now but even so one had to really work hard. It was always stressful this rescue work and it was never easy. You never knew what you would find when you got there. You might catch the foreman on a bad day and you've come all the way from Guildford . The times we had disappointments or you went up to rescue a lovely Art Nouveau newel post and were told that you could not rescue it even after explaining to the site foreman how special it was; all very frustrating. It wasn't exactly very uplifting, standing there in the rain with your tool bag and your heart broken!
Many times that sort of thing happened and my friends would take me across the road for a cup of coffee and try to cheer me up and take me over to Hackney to London Fields to another site. They were marvellous but of course I had to store everything at their house because I wasn't allowed to bring it home as my parents, at that stage, were right against it!
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References:
TheBrookingCollection.com DartfordArchive.org.uk IHBC.org.uk ProjectBook.co.uk
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