History of The Foreign and Commonwealth Office Main Building
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office occupies a building which originally provided premises for four separate government departments: the Foreign Office, the India Office, the Colonial Office, and the Home Office. Construction on the building began in 1861 and finished in 1868, and it was designed by the architect George Gilbert Scott. Its architecture is in the Italianate style; Scott had initially envisaged a Gothic design, but Lord Palmerston, then Prime Minister, insisted on a classical style. English sculptors Henry Hugh Armstead and John Birnie Philip produced a number of allegorical figures ('Art', 'Law', 'Commerce', etc.) for the exterior.
In 1925, the Foreign Office played host to the signing of the Locarno Treaties, aimed at reducing tension in Europe. The ceremony took place in a suite of rooms that had been designed for banqueting, which subsequently became known as the Locarno Suite. During the Second World War, the Locarno Suite's fine furnishings were removed or covered up, and it became home to a foreign office code-breaking department.
Due to increasing numbers of staff, the offices became increasingly cramped and much of the fine Victorian interior was covered over—especially after World War II. In the 1960s, demolition was proposed, as part of major redevelopment plan for the area drawn up by architect Sir Leslie Martin. A subsequent public outcry prevented these proposals from ever being implemented. Instead, the Foreign Office became a Grade 1 listed building in 1970. In 1978, the Home office moved to a new building, easing overcrowding.
With a new sense of the building's historical value, it underwent a 17-year, £100 million restoration process, completed in 1997. The Locarno Suite, used as offices and storage since the Second World War, was fully restored for use in international conferences. The building is now open to the public each year over Open House Weekend. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office is now also the main tenant of the Old Admiralty Building, at the opposite end of Horse Guards Parade.
Read more about this topic: Foreign And Commonwealth Office
Famous quotes containing the words history of the, history of, history, foreign, commonwealth, office, main and/or building:
“Three million of such stones would be needed before the work was done. Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds, every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place in the great pyramid. From the quarries they pulled the stones across the desert to the banks of the Nile. Never in the history of the world had so great a task been performed. Their faith gave them strength, and their joy gave them song.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.”
—J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)
“the young men who watch us from the curbs:
They hold the glaze of wonder in their stare
Our crooked backs, hands fetid as old herbs,
The tallow eyes, wax face, the foreign hair!”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.”
—Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
“Just across the Green from the post office is the county jail, seldom occupied except by some backwoodsman who has been intemperate; the courthouse is under the same roof. The dog warden usually basks in the sunlight near the harness store or the post office, his golden badge polished bright.”
—Administration for the State of Con, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)