London Guide
Whitehall
Whitehall, the unusually broad avenue connecting Trafalgar Square to Parliament Square, is synonymous with the faceless, pinstriped bureaucracy charged with the day-to-day running of the country, and that inhabits the governmental ministries which line the street. The statues dotted about recall the days when Whitehall stood at the centre of an empire on which the sun never set.
Whitehall was once the site of Whitehall Palace, which started out as the London seat of the Archbishop of York, but was confiscated and greatly extended by Henry VIII after a fire at Westminster Palace forced the king to find alternative accommodation; it was here that he celebrated his marriage to Anne Boleyn in 1533, and here that he died fourteen years later. Described by one contemporary chronicler as nothing but "a heap of houses erected at diverse times and of different models, made continuous", it boasted some two thousand rooms and stretched for half a mile along the Thames. Not much of Whitehall Palace survived the fire of 1698, caused by a Dutch laundrywoman, after which, partly due to the dank conditions in this part of town, the royal residence shifted to St James's and Kensington. Since then nearly all the key governmental ministries and offices have migrated here, rehousing themselves on an ever-increasing scale, a process which reached its apogee with the grimly bland Ministry of Defence (MoD) building, the largest office block in London when it was completed in 1957.
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