The Swiss Centre, Leicester Square

If you’ve followed my blog at all recently you’ll know that I’ve undertaken a challenge to produce sketches of every property on the traditional London Monopoly board. Where I’ve made decent sketches of the properties in the past I’ve allowed myself to use them instead of making new sketches. Nonetheless, by last Saturday I had made 18 to take me up to Coventry Street. Ok.

If you’ve seen at least a few of the sketches I’ve made, you’ll know that they largely depict scenes from the end of the 19^th century or the start of the 20^th century. What can I say? I like old buildings. I like drawing scenes that depict what London was like.

I am not a lover of many modern buildings. I was born in London in the mid-60s. Now, I’m not totally blind to the realities of life in the modern world. I’m fully aware of the fact that London took a real hammering in the Second World War. The Socialist government elected in 1945 had a lot of big promises to fulfil and no money with which to do it. Personally I think it’s remarkable how much they managed to achieve. Still, with so many Brits, so many Londoners homeless, or living in untenable cramped conditions because of the number of homes destroyed during the war, it was imperative to build cheaply, to build quickly and to build upwards. So for the next few decades cities and towns across the UK saw a growth of brutalist concrete office and residential blocks.

Change is one of the few constants in life. I know that you can’t keep something just because it’s old. Otherwise we’d all still be living in bronze age round houses. But from a very early age I formed strong opinions about the architecture around me. I knew what I liked and I knew what I didn’t like, and I didn’t like concrete blocks. Large, monolithic, unadorned, these monsters just chill the soul. Concrete may be a very useful building material. . . but it is just not suitable for life in the UK climate! It doesn't take many years before the concrete looks awful.

So, yes, I’m largely not a great fan of post-war British architecture. Which is maybe why, when I find a postwar British building that I actually like, then I tend to make more of a fuss over it. Such a building is. . . was, the Swiss Centre in Leicester Square. So when I came to sketch Coventry Street, the Swiss Centre right on the edge of Coventry Street is what I chose to draw.

The Swiss Centre’s whole working life fitted within my own lifetime. Work began on it in 1963, while I was born a year later. However it didn’t open until 1966. Its original purpose was as a showcase for Switzerland and its products - hence the name - and it contained a ticket office for Swissair and various retail outlets. The Swiss Centre closed in 2007 and was demolished in 2008. The distinctive glockenspiel clock from the front of the building was restored, and eventually returned to the area of Leicester Square now named Swiss Court. As for the site of the Swiss Centre, a new building was put there, which contained M&M’s World when I last visited in 2021.

The Swiss Centre was designed in a modernist style by architect David Aberdeen (1913 – 1987). I also like his modernistic Shrewsbury Market Hall, although not as much as the Swiss Centre. I’m afraid that I really don’t like his Congress House, opened 8 years before the Swiss Centre as the headquarters of the Trades Union Congress. To me this is a  nondescript generic, post war concrete block – yet it’s this one and not the Swiss Centre that became a listed building! Go figure.

I think that the problem the Swiss Centre faced was that by the end of the 20^th century the land it stood on was a lot more valuable commercially than the building. The last time I saw it the ground floor outlets seemed to be almost exclusively flogging tourist tat, and the place looked run down and a bit seedy. Whether it will turn out to be one of those buildings which will see people in the future start to say – why did we ever pull that down? – well, I don’t really know about that. It only had a working life of just over 40 years. In an internet search I found many photographs of the building, but only the one painting showing it, and no sketches. But I liked it.