Compromise. A solid, decent, respectable sort of word that sums up the English way of doing things, - as "rational" might the French, or "passionate" the Spanish. Compromise means never having to say sorry to any one party; compromise ensures that, even if no one is ecstatically happy, at least no one is notably unhappy. And, every now and then, good old English compromise can be turned from a social balancing act into the highest form of art. Oh? When?
In the design, for example, of St Paul's Cathedral, in which Sir Christopher Wren, the most gentlemanly of English gentlemen, fused together the plan of a medieval Gothic cathedral and the style of a Baroque palazzo, capped them with the world's most beautiful dome, and left us - 300 years down the line - a monument of sublime dignity and a building that is still deferred to by the steel, concrete and glass towers that surround it. Even Richard Rogers's Lloyds Building or Richard Seifert's NatWest Tower are mere foils to Wren's masterpiece.
From this summer, and for the next five years, we will see if good old English compromise can come to the aid of this City of London site again. After nearly 13 years of talks, plans and disagreements, St Paul's is to be flanked on its north side by a redeveloped Paternoster Square, an arcaded rank of office blocks, shops, bars and restaurants designed to discourage banks and other financial institutions from deserting the Square Mile. Full planning permission has been granted for the project, and demolition of the old (well, not that old) buildings has already begun.
The new-look Paternoster Square will consist of six chunky buildings clad in brick and stone (some marble, bronze and brass too, no doubt) around a new public square based loosely on some early Renaissance Italian piazza. The buildings will be from three to seven storeys, with the lower ones nearer St Paul's so as not to overshadow it as earlier schemes threatened to do.
The architects chosen to attend Wren are chaps who, although excellent on occasion, are unlikely to rock the boat. Meet MacCormac Jamieson Prichard, Sir Michael Hopkins and Partners, Allies and Morrison, John Simpson, and Whitfield Partners which is headed by Sir William Whitfield - like Wren, a quietly spoken, determined and immaculately dressed English gentleman who was given the task a few years ago of reaching a compromise solution that would ease this £350 million commercial development through a whirlpool of indignant critics to the safe harbour of the Prince of Wales's approval.
Prince Charles played a key role in the first plans to build a new Paternoster Square in 1987. Before Sir William's appointment by the Mitsubishi Estate Company, the project was plagued by sharp and effective criticism. The US-style, Postmodern Classical buildings that were to have ganged up on St Paul's were attacked for being too big, too crass and in danger of overshadowing the cathedral.
Criticism focused not simply on the pantomime qualities of the big, blowsy buildings, but on the uses to which they would have been put: a vast underground shopping arcade and more boring office space than even the crustiest bank would want to let. More than this, the lumbering buildings would have been built on a massive, inflexible new infrastructure ill adapted to future change.
So, out went the scheme endorsed by Prince Charles, a monstrous carbuncle that would have defaced St Paul's for many decades to come, and in came Sir William and his team of trusty English buffers with tweedy, trilby-hatted designs. And, hey presto, after a large spoon of Whitfield's Compromise, planning permission has been granted and work is about to begin.
NO one can seriously argue for the retention of the existing buildings to the north of St Paul's, an austerity of passionless 1950s design gathered around forlorn and even tragic plazas. Yet what we might have expected here is something quite different, a recreation in contemporary guise of what used to be here. Before the Blitz, Paternoster Lane and the warp and weft of tiny streets and alleys that threaded across it was the sort of English compromise that worked so very well. This was the heart and soul of the publishing world: a slightly foxed cluster of bookshops and bookstalls, publishing houses and coffee houses, workshops and rooms to rent for the gentlemanly yet down-at-heel. What this old quarter had was precisely what the Prince of Wales's plan and the Whitfield scheme lack: vibrant, everyday life.
To work as a piece of likeable city planning, Paternoster Square needs to offer places to live as well as places to bank and broke, a street market of some sort (books, at least, would be an appropriate choice), small, privately run shops as well as the natty chains that are bound to predominate. In other words, it needs changes of pace that would bring a kind of mongrel life, a bit of chance and randomness, to the area between St Paul's and Smithfield, which today is as dull an urban ditch as you will encounter anywhere in Europe.
Such a romantic development is sadly impossible given the financial factors of the Paternoster equation. The scheme is a piece of prime property development. Its first job is to make a profit for the patient Mitsubishi Estate Company, its second to offer lashings of the kind of office space modern counting houses say they need. While it has to pretend that it is some sort of artistic work, in reality it will be a brute machine for making money, a spiv dressed up in what is meant to pass for a modern City gent's suit. It just doesn't convince. When completed in around 2004, Paternoster Square will look frumpy, rather claustrophobic and outdated.
There have been many suggestions as to what should have happened here - forget the whole caboodle and plant a beautiful City garden instead has perhaps been the most popular - yet the truth is that little could have been done while the scheme had to be a shock of offices or shops. But it should have been possible to design the buildings in a much lighter, airier and more contemporary style.
Such a look would allow the cathedral to again dominate the area. Buildings making greater use of glass could have been brought up close to St Paul's without competing with it. But, again, how airy could they have been, given that more office space is what the developers need to make their money and what the Corporation of London believes the City needs? Nevertheless, there is a worry that a younger generation of City slickers, for whom modern architecture is desirable rather than alienating, will find the tweedy compromise of the new Paternoster Square a bit of a bore: a touch of New York or, dare one say it, Frankfurt might well hold far more appeal.
Possibly the Corporation of London has not thought the scheme through as carefully as it might have. It has been so keen to rid itself of the old buildings - and they are truly eyesores - that it has not really considered the implications and the iconography of the designs that will replace them.
Recently the lord mayor of London signalled the onset of the demolition of old Paternoster Square by smashing a raised concrete flower bed. As he set to his iconoclastic task, an RAF band played the Dambusters March. Ho ho. Will the mayor and corporation be laughing on the other sides of their ruddy faces in 10 or 20 years' time?
It is too early to say, yet what we do know is that the architecture of the new-look Paternoster Square is no oil painting. Here, the art of compromise has failed to create art, as Wren did when he secretly changed the commissioned design of St Paul's over many years and turned a wimpish church into a mighty civic temple that stands comparison with the greatest works of Rome and the Italian Renaissance. There is, as you will soon see under the peerless dome of St Paul's, compromise and compromise.
