WHITEHALL

Whitehall the road takes its name from a royal palace. For the most part, the complex lay between the present road and the Thames.

Whitehall is the senior, central strand of the Civil Service. Many of the ministries principal buildings are located along Whitehall or the streets to the south-west of it.

Until the late 18^thC most government departments were small, and were housed in accommodation that was scattered across the West End and the City of London. The only sizable bureaucratic building was the Sir William Chambers-designed Somerset House (1786).

The politicians who headed the ministries were members of one or other of the Houses of Parliament. During the course of a working day, they often had to be present in the Chamber, therefore, their ministerial offices needed to be near Parliament. As the Crown-granted leases along Whitehall expired, the government tended to hand the properties over to various offices of state. The 1890s were a decade during which the powers and responsibilities of the state grew. As a consequence, the size of the central bureaucracy expanded and a lot of building work was done for the government around Whitehall to accommodate the expanded ranks of officialdom.

In the mid-1960s the government entertained a plan that would have involved demolishing most of the buildings along Whitehall. In their place would have been erected a seven-storey concrete ziggurat that would have born the title Government Centre.

In 1979 Derek Rayner (1926-1998), the managing director of Marks & Spencer, was appointed to review Whitehall's methods.

Location: Whitehall, SW1A 2NS. (The section between Whitehall and Parliament Square is called Parliament Street.) (blue, grey)

Lunches

The University of Oxford academic philosopher Mary Warnock (Baroness Warnock) (1924-2019) sat on numerous government committees of inquiry. In the mid-1980s she remarked that she had become an authority on the Whitehall lunch . The ones she liked least were those served by the Home Office, which consisted of little bits of pork pie and sandwiches wrapped up in clingfilm.

See Also: FOOD

Ministers

George Brown

George Brown came to be regarded as one of the most able of trades union Labour M.P.s. A skilled public speaker, he relished putting down hecklers. In 1960 he was elected as the Deputy Leader of the party. In the post he proved temperamental and took to drinking too much alcohol. Three years later he stood for the leadership of the party but lost the contest to Harold Wilson. In 1966 he was appointed to the Foreign Secretaryship. The following year the satirical magazine Private Eye coined the term tired and emotional to describe the minister's drunken behaviour. It is reputed that upon one occasion Mr Brown was attending an event, when a band started playing music. Having become somewhat refreshed , he invited a fellow attendee, who was wearing a floor-length garment, to dance with him. The reply came, I am a bishop and this is the national anthem.

Location: King Charles Street, Whitehall, SW1A 2AH (blue, brown)

Parkinson's Law

C. Northcote Parkinson became known through coining Parkinson's Law. He was an academic naval historian. He noted that as the number of naval ships declined so the Admiralty's bureaucracy expanded. He observed the same phenomenon in the Colonial Office.

David Backhouse 2024