Great Britain: A Whitehall Elephant

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On the outside, Britain's Foreign Office is bastard Byzantine; inside it is a stately slum. A grimy, drafty pile of Victorian granite opposite 10 Downing Street, it has been likened to a provincial Italian museum, a stranded gunboat, a monument to Muddling Through. Yet when the government announced plans last month to demolish the building, traditionalists reacted as if Eton were being nationalized. "Magnificently British!" harrumphed Lord Harrowby. "Representative of our greatest period!" snapped Lord Salisbury.

In fact, the Foreign Office was a Whitehall elephant almost from the day it opened in 1868. It was modeled on a Venetian palazzo, after Architect Sir Gilbert Scott's original Gothic façade was indignantly rejected by Prime Minister Lord Palmerston as "admirable for a monastery." (It later made an admirable Gothic railway station.) From a pompous exterior decked with 63 allegorical statues to regal suites designed more for la dolce vita than diplomacy, the building was so wildly inappropriate that within ten years after completion it was roundly condemned by a parliamentary commission.

Efficiency v. Elegance. To keep pace with a London-based staff that grew from 75 to 2,262 in its 96 years, the Foreign Office desperately divided and subdivided its ornate acreage. Today it is a dim maze of minute, plywood cubbyholes linked by mosaic-floored corridors and a warren of back stairs. Many of the garrets have no windows, or only a piece of one, and most of the windows cannot be opened anyway. Even the mouse-ridden attics have been carved into typists' collectives and digs for bachelor-duty officers.

The building aptly symbolizes the guerrilla warfare between efficiency and mere embellishment that has bedeviled the Foreign Office since the birth of modern diplomacy in the mid-19th century. Even its radiators belong in a museum. Though elderly, blue-liveried porters haul interminable scuttles of coke to feed 500 open fires, wintertime at the Foreign Office is a perpetual struggle. There are electric lights in the chandeliers, but the wiring is so overburdened that only Room 53, the Foreign Secretary's office, rates an electric heater (two, in fact). Telegraphic facilities were installed over the objections of an under secretary who warned direly that it would "make every person in a hurry."

Until the late 19th century, the main qualifications for a Foreign Office job were a good family, a smattering of languages, and big, clear handwriting. During Lord Palmerston's 16 years as Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, state papers were constantly returned from 10 Downing Street with testy quibbles on the writer's grammar or his handwriting, which, Palmerston insisted, should slope forward, not backward "like the raking masts of an American schooner."