Capital Designs: Australia House and Visions of an Imperial London. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2018. xix + 416pp. 47 plates. Bibliography. £25.00 pbk

• Published in: Urban history 2020, Vol.47 (3), p.558-559
• Main Author: Attard, B P
• Format: Review
• Language: English
• Subjects: 20th century; Architecture; Design; Edwardian period; Historic buildings & sites; Scholarly publishing
• ISSN: 0963-9268; 1469-8706
• DOI: 10.1017/S0963926820000383

Australia House, officially opened by George V on 3 August 1918, is a substantial Beaux-Arts building on a site formed by the eastern junction of the Strand and Aldwych in London's Westminster district. Construction started in 1913, on the cusp of changes which would affect everything from politics to architecture. On many levels, therefore, Australia House was an expression of its time. It was the first purpose-built set of offices for a British Dominion government in the imperial capital and planned on a generous scale to accommodate not only Australia's high commissioner, but also the representatives of the six Australian states (having already incorporated the building occupied by the Victorian agent-general), the London branch of the Commonwealth Bank and commercial tenants whose rents would cover some of the cost. Eileen Chanin has written a richly textured architectural history which meticulously covers all aspects of the acquisition of the site and the building's conception, design, decoration and construction. It is, however, by no means a narrowly focused study of a single structure. Chanin's guiding principle is that: ‘A great building is a mirror of the society that conceived it…[its] origin and history tell about the era from which it came’ (p. 278). Her study is about Australia's aspiration to create a fitting symbol of its nationhood within the imperial metropolis. But it is equally an account of the efforts of the Victorians and Edwardians to reimagine their own city as that imperial metropolis. In Chanin's book, the two stories converge. Just as importantly, Chanin makes the strong case for reappraising the Edwardian architecture of inner London.