Hamilton - who’s still around, hale and hearty, aged 77 - had somehow managed to make an exceptional building from a dull brief, in incredibly constrained surroundings. He was given a patch of land left over from the swirl of proposed motorway and roads. This patch happened to be on the far side of the motorway from the railway goods yard it was intended to serve, but connected through underneath. Here the glory of the place starts to emerge. Because on the southern, motorway/goods yard side, all is Mad Max industrial desolation - the goods yard, its railway lines long gone, is now part of the vast, frenzied construction site surrounding Paddington. But on the northern side, you are immediately - with that abrupt change of scale, pace and texture at which London excels - in a different world. The leafy world of Little Venice, where canals flow between trees, where stuccoed villas abound, where people sip frothy lattes at open-air cafes. Hamilton’s building mediates between the two worlds.
He was in his thirties when the commission came in - working for British Rail’s architects’ department, and running his private practice with John Bicknell in the evenings. So in architectural terms, it’s a young man’s building. He relates how it took just four weeks from getting the commission, to getting planning permission. Moreover, he had a totally free hand. “The budget was left to me,” Hamilton now recalls. “I knew it would get no maintenance, so I designed it to last. Everyone agreed they would take my word for it. Things were more liberal in those days. Architects maybe had a higher status.”
There were problems and redesigns, particularly when Barbara Castle, then Minister of Transport, suddenly decided to widen the Westway. One of the final pieces of the design - a bravura concrete mushroom-shaped freestanding canopy outside, balanced on a single column - was a late request from the client, to shelter outdoor workers washing lorries. This part was designed in ten minutes flat, says Hamilton. The whole building was listed by English Heritage in 1994, when it was still under threat of demolition.
And today? Ceri Davies and her colleagues have made some fairly hefty alterations - carving a three-storey height, slate-floored atrium for Monsoon’s reception out of Hamilton’s massive concrete slabs, inserting a mezzanine floor in the ground level where the parcel trucks used to drive in and out, adding some new windows. The sunlit rooftop office of Peter Simon, Monsoon’s founder and boss, is made from what used to be a plant room. But the only part of the building that had decayed to the point of needing replacement were the bands of projecting metal-framed windows. This has been done with sensitivity. Outside, the concrete is clad in original buff-coloured Japanese mosaic, now cleaned and stabilised. The masterly internal stairwell at the prow of the building has balustrades clad in pale blue glass mosaic. Most of the floors have the original “quarry tiles”. Even the stairs to the plant rooms on the upper levels have teak handrails.
Remember - this was not a public building, nor an upmarket office block. It was a blue-collar depot, designed on a series of curves not least to accommodate the turning-circles of trucks. Its slightly 1930s look is pure coincidence, says Hamilton. But - in contrast to the previously widespread perception that the Sixties was an era of cheapskate, flimsy architecture- here they spent money on making something durable and beautiful. As Hamilton says: “One always assumed that eventually its use would change.”
For new items, such as the main reception desk and the moveable furniture in the staff restaurant, Davies has picked up on the curvilinear aesthetic of the original. All the new doors that an office building needs are veneered in a dark-stained sycamore, a popular Sixties choice. Fortunately, Monsoon - which employs around 200 designers, pattern-cutters and office staff - is an open-plan organization, so there was little need to divide up the spaces. The interior fit-out is clearly of 2001 rather than 35 years ago - pastiche is avoided - but it is sympathetic to the architecture.
