View from Soho ideal house

In a wild mood of extravagance (recession, what recession?) an oilfield-sized ransom is being spent in my area. Not on anything I'm particularly keen about, but on a massive scheme to transform Oxford Street so everyone will want to go there even more than they do now. Which is a bit peculiar because, thanks to lovely just call us Chaos Crossrail, loads of people are already foaming at the mouth to get there and can't. And they won't be able to for at least another year. The authorities in charge of digging found a Victorian water main that needed to be replaced, apparently, and they can't possibly deal with it quickly, so a vast stretch of that highway is closed to traffic, and people in little streets in Fitzrovia are parting their curtains and finding themselves eyeball to eyeball with passengers having breakdowns on diverted, delayed buses.

It's the same throughout London it recently emerged that there'd been 370,000 roadworks in the past twelve months, which works out as every single street being dug up four times. And there's no sign of a ceasefire. At the end of March, Simon Jenkins in the Evening Standard confirmed what a taxi driver told me two years ago, between beating his head on his steering wheel that in Tokyo you can dig at night but must return the streets to public use in the morning. Sucks to that, whoop the utility companies and their confreres, let's see how much worse we can make it!

So, what with the digging and the diversions and the plans for hotels and shopping developments, one of the West End 's main arteries, already a mess on a scale only the patient English would tolerate, is set for a blitz on a scale not seen since the Second World War.

And unfortunately I am living in the midst of this mayhem. But as much that was familiar vanishes from my personal map, a building I'm truly relieved to see left alone is one I really think you'd find interesting, and which you can reach (believe me) from Oxford Circus or Regent Street. It's on the corner of Argyle Street and Great Marlborough Street , and it's as much a landmark as the nearby Palladium or the famous store it faces.

I've never seen anything like it anywhere else not that size anyway. You see examples of the style in people's hands on Flog It or The Antiques Roadshow, but we're talking about an eight storey building here, and one I don't just know by sight. When I was in my teens I spent nearly a year working in it!

First, though, let's look at this extraordinary structure the best place to stand and stare is by the arch beneath Liberty's clock in Great Marlborough Street, so that you have a diagonal view, and from a sufficient distance to take it all in. What hits you immediately is the colour it's black, which already makes its huge gleaming sides stand out from everything else around it, and the surface is beautifully shiny, polished granite.

But we're only just beginning. The topmost storey is inset, and around its upper rim, startling against the black, runs an intricate gold and green and pale orange decoration, like stylised flames licking upwards around the edge of the roof. One storey lower the shape of the building becomes uniform, but that's the only conventional thing about it: beneath an ornate cornice, the gold runs riot, outlining the same trio of colours, expanding in a wonderful, stunning tracery that surrounds the windows and drapes downwards like a great hanging fringe. All this incredibly delicate work is made of bronze and enamel, and on the ground floor, the windows of what are at present a restaurant and a café are both framed by flowering curves and circles of the same gold and orange and green. The shapes and shades are very distinctive, clearly owing a debt to Moorish and Persian influences. The building is pure art deco, and my nomination for the most striking example of the style in London.

It was built in 1929, designed by an American architect named Raymond Hood, and it used to be named Ideal House. Not because it was thought of as an ideal place to live in, but because it was home to a company that produced useful, sensible, practical things that couldn't have been more of a contrast to the extremes of fantasy outside: Ideal Standard, who manufactured bathroom suites and heating boilers.

The company's known for bathrooms nowadays, but back in the late 'fifties and early 'sixties it was a very down to earth firm, and the art deco windows on the Great Marlborough Street side of the building displayed solid, reliable boilers. (It was above these, on the first floor, in the Advertising Department, that I worked.)

But more of an ideal to me were the displays in the Argyle Street windows! Here were the lushly carpeted homes of the bathroom suites, elegant beyond words. These luxurious realms were presided over by a dapper, charming little Frenchman and a glamorous lady. The Frenchman was adorably funny, hysterical at the information he had to provide when showing customers a bidet. They even ask which way round they should sit and told me his explanation was that you should regard the taps as a horse's ears, and cluck Bidet Bidet, as though you were saying Giddyup

Sadly, it was all too rare for me to enter the glorious areas given over to his wares, no matter how much I longed to in those days many people still had either very primitive bathrooms or none at all, and here was a world of utter luxury. I remember, whilst waiting one day amongst the delicate colours and flawless mirrors, that a County gentleman who'd been spending a lot of money asked me my name (in a and what are you doing here little girl manner) and went on to enquire whether I was one of the Shropshire Baxters. No, I was one of the Soho Baxters, but I was much too intimidated to tell him that, and I snatched the papers I had come for and ran back up to the Advertising Department where I had friends.

The building has been renamed Palladium House, and you'll see that wording over the entrance in Argyle Street which used to be the way to the Frenchman's glamorous emporium. But our entrance, the staff entrance, was via a little door that you really have to squint to see, farther up Argyle Street, right at the end of the black block and much nearer to the Palladium. Here, unbelievably, although we were office staff, we had to clock in!

There was a weird apparatus with a fruit machine-style handle which you wrenched down, making a violent clang. Metal plates would part and a square of paper would appear with the time stamped on it, and you signed your name in the gap beside the evidence with a breath of relief if you were early. But the Sales Reps never were. They threw themselves into the entrance in a mob and skidded to a halt at the apparatus, grabbing the handle from me to hold it still, so that the required time wouldn't be lost and a new and later one revealed, and then scrawled their signatures in tiny letters all around mine.

The Reps were on the same floor as the Advertising Department the first but an entirely different breed. They wore smart suits and were loud and lewd, cordoned off from us behind sets of doors, while the men around me were a far nicer and more interesting bunch. They were also a relief after the people I'd worked with in my previous job, who'd made me so nervous that I broke fourteen cups and saucers in my first week, bringing them tea.

I was spared any such duty now, and introduced to a whole new pastime going out for coffee in the middle of the morning. I'd only read about doing that in American books, and I could hardly believe it was legal for us all to troop out of the building and into Carnaby Street to the Bonbonniere Café. Yes, this was the era of espresso machines, but it was much more fashionable to drink lemon tea, which I forced myself to swallow in a desperate attempt to keep up.

I thought the men in the department were fascinating, and flew home at lunch times to tell my mother everything they said. I was already reading every classic I could lay hands on, to further the education that'd had to be cut short, and had found Zola, George Sand, Guy de Maupassant and Collette for myself. I was taking a deep breath before tackling the Russians, but what was being discussed around me was modern, so I read Durrell's Alexandria quartet, wanting to understand the arguments.

I read Nabokov's Lolita too, because I was told it was brilliant. And I agreed. But back then it was still widely regarded as pornography, and a year later, in a book group, I was the only person to raise my hand when we were asked whether any of us had read it. Froideur surrounded me like ectoplasm I was the youngest person present, and female . Bad combination the age of magazines with sexual advice for pre-pubescent girls was far in the future. (Would you believe that at a party in the 'sixties an affluent middle-aged woman told me her husband had forbidden her to read Mary McCarthy's The Group because it contained things he couldn't bring himself to repeat?)

But the Advertising Department wasn't just educational, it was fun. Two of the men took me to a Gilbert and Sullivan production, which I loathed , much to the chortling delight of the Modern Jazz Quartet faction. They had paper aeroplane fights and one of them was a brilliant mimic. And, oh, how lovely to crowd at our windows, lined by the artists' drawing boards, and gaze down at the customers going into Liberty's, if we glimpsed anyone famous or especially interesting.

Where there are now displays of cosmetics and perfume, the store had an extensive Art Department , and a Book Department alongside it. I'd often be caught by some particularly arresting picture or print and stop to stare, and from our vantage point over the road we saw beautiful people get out of Bentleys to do the same thing. Liberty's store had been part of my life for as long as I could remember, and it still is. Bearing in mind that it's been in Regent Street since the nineteenth century, as a child I was puzzled when my mother said she remembered it being built (my mother was that old?), but what she was talking about was the Tudor structure that's so famous and familiar. That was created in 1924, using the timbers from two ships, when the fashion for Tudor revival was at its height. But building a store in the style, and running it across two buildings, was a truly inspired move once seen, never forgotten. The gables and beams, the golden galleon weathervane and the clock on the arch above Kingly Street it's not just a store, it's a landmark, and you feel like a privileged guest when you walk inside.

From across the road, we used to be constantly drawn to look at it, hearing as the day passed the notes of every quarter hour's chimes. The clock had intricate, beautifully painted and articulated figures of St. George and the Dragon, one chasing the other out of sight and back into view again behind a grill every time the clock struck.

A couple of years ago these figures went missing, and in their place a motionless, silent and rather sinister creation, perhaps a juvenile dragon with an attitude and an ASBO, lurked in the dimness behind the grille. I asked everywhere, contacted every archive without success, until I learned eventually from an archivist the store's switchboard had initially told me they didn't have, that a fault in the mechanism had stopped the chasing and striking, and the figures had been removed while estimates were obtained for repairs.

They were gone for so long that I just about gave up hope (even Liberty might be feeling the recession and cutting their costs), but at last in the New Year St. George and the Dragon returned to their places, fresh for the start of 2011!

As the months have passed and sun has lit the clock it has become more and more eye catching. The gorgeous figures halt above the street, St. George's golden armour shining, his white horse rearing, its reins gold studded, the dragon caught, tensed, snarling menace, its green and red colouring traced with gilding. And when the clock strikes the knight chases his enemy into the darkness and out again. The only disappointment is that the chimes don't seem to ring through the neighbourhood as often as they once did.

I contacted Liberty 's archivist, my sole previous source of reliable information, and learned that sometimes they chime and sometimes they don't, as though their attitude had changed while they'd been away. A new independence has asserted itself (perhaps they heard talk in the workshop where they were repaired and realised how many hours they spent galloping about) so now you will certainly see them, but there's no guarantee that a chime and a chase will occur every fifteen minutes. At least they've reclaimed their territory, though, even if they do spend more time standing still.

Meanwhile, Ideal House (Palladium House, I should say) is unaltered, although I think any café or restaurant would make the ground floor look messy, so that the bronze and enamel work cannot stand out as they should at that level, but my memories of my time there are amongst the happiest I've ever had of office work. Against all expectations, I turned out to be a whiz at shorthand and typing, which not only made life easier but was more useful than I'd have believed in my wildest dreams, and I only left because Ideal Standard retrenched our Department to its headquarters in Hull , and we all disbanded.

Tiny incidents stand out watching the sunlight strike through a paperweight on the Advertising Manager's desk, and saying absently as we both looked at the way it bent, Refraction. He gaped at me and asked in awe, Do they teach girls about that. Having one of the artists paint a Mothering Sunday card that I could give to my mother. Being taken out for lunches, meals and drinks, and meeting someone in a cocktail bar for the first time in my life I was so short sighted I walked right past him, and had to be rescued. Laughing till I was helpless as the mimic took off every single person in the Department (me included), flawlessly and mercilessly. (I rarely, if ever, in an office, laughed as much.) The collection of presents and messages I was given when I left I've had immeasurably more valuable gifts, but few words as enchanting.

Do look at the building for yourself I'm so glad it's there for you. You won't have my memories, but you will have a very special, Art Deco treat.

© Alida Baxter

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