The courtyard at BMA House, Tavistock Square, London. Photo © Peter Payne
The coffered, barrel-vaulted ceiling in the Great Hall at BMA House. Photo © Paul Waite
Tour of BMA House, Tavistock Square, London
21 January, 2023
By Peter Payne
Lutyens Trust members were invited to a guided tour of the Grade II-listed BMA House, the HQ of the British Medical Association (BMA), which today houses its offices and events venues (also available for private hire). The building was originally designed by Edwin Lutyens in 1911 as the HQ of The Theosophical Society. In 1925, the BMA took it over.
We were shown round by Ian Beech, Senior Property Project Manager, who explained the connection between Lutyens and The Theosophical Society: Lutyens’s wife, Lady Emily, a Theosophist, introduced him to the society’s president, Annie Besant, who asked him to design its HQ in Bloomsbury, London.
It was intended to be a quadrangular building with a courtyard with an arched entrance surmounted by a large cupola on the western side. The entire building would have extended from Burton Street to the east and to Tavistock Square to the west. When construction was suspended due to the outbreak of the First World War, only three sides around the courtyard and The Great Hall, in the centre, had been built.
There were two smaller, double-height halls – comprising a basement and first floor – on opposite sides of the courtyard. The interiors of both these halls – called the Hastings Hall, which is no longer double height and now houses the Anderson-Barnes suite of meeting rooms on the north side of the courtyard, and the Council Chamber, still double height and occupied by a café – were painted pale yellow and white.
Unforeseen extra costs soured Lutyens’s relations with the Theosophists. His original estimate of building costs was £45,000 to £50,000, and Besant was angry when tenders came out at £111,000. But Lutyens argued his estimates had been made on half-finished sketches based on Theosophists wanting the building enlarged, flats added, halls enlarged and two new facades designed, meaning new plans had to be drawn up. Relations were strained further by the Theosophists insisting on employing only trade unionists and sacking Lutyens’s clerk of works without telling him.
Lutyens offered his resignation in 1914, although progress on construction of the building was halted due to the War after which the Theosophists could not afford to finish it, so it was sold. Lutyens’s original design for their HQ was more ambitious than the one that stands today since only half of it was built. The front section off Tavistock Square was designed by Cyril Wontner-Smith in a different, lightly Baroque manner but no less inspired by Lutyens’s style during the first phase of the project.
Lutyens’s design was in the Neoclassical Palladian style, his term for which was “Wrenaissance”, which he widely adopted after abandoning the romantic vernacular style of his earlier country houses. In 1903, Lutyens wrote to Herbert Baker: “In architecture, Palladio is the game. It is so big – few appreciate it now and it requires considerable training to value and realise it”.
Lutyens was brought back by the BMA to “renovate” the building. He said that he thought the work overseen by the Theosophists’ committee, when he was not supervising the project, was “very bad”. He added a set of memorial gates, called “The Gate of Remembrance”, that commemorated the 574 BMA members who died in the First World War.
The Great Hall has very large windows on the west elevation, each with 54 panes of glass as well as small, textured imperial-sized bricks. In addition to the Great Hall, which you see to the east as you enter the courtyard and which is three storeys high, there are two two-storey halls across the courtyard from each other to north and south. On the south side, a mezzanine walkway has been inserted, with the lower floor housing a café opening into the garden. On the north side, the two-storey room has had a new floor installed in it to accommodate two meeting rooms. A false ceiling has also been placed into the Great Hall, hiding its impressive coffered, barrel-vaulted roof. However, meeting rooms were inserted above the Great Hall’s false ceiling, and the vaulted ceiling is visible here. Lutyens wanted the barrel vault to span the length of the Great Hall, but only the ends were constructed. The main, very low double-pitched roof was painted internally “nocturnal green” and “dead black”, while the steel frame was gilded. This is now concealed by suspended ceilings. The two lines of columns in the Great Hall were painted to resemble peacock-blue marble, an effect similar to the green verdite columns in his building for Midland Bank’s headquarters at Poultry in the City of London (now hotel The Ned).
When Lutyens designed the Tavistock Square building he created large rooms which have since been divided up by timber walling and suspended ceilings which hide elegant plaster ceilings and detailing, while fireplaces have been hidden behind partitions.
One notable room is the Prince’s Room above the entrance arch, designed by Wontner-Smith, with its two tall windows looking over Tavistock Square to the west and courtyard of BMA House to the east. The room is square but with a circular dome supported by pillars. It has unusual acoustics where voices can be heard across the room from corner to corner but not at right-angles to the two corners. There is also an echo when you are under the central candelabra – it’s not a room for quietly divulging secrets.
Some of Lutyens’s interiors are still visible, with the original Members’ Common Room now used as the Members’ Dining Room. Ian stated that this was where doctors and others were on 7 July, 2005 when one of the four suicide bombers, who targeted London’s transport system that day, blew himself up on a bus travelling through Tavistock Square, immediately outside BMA House. It became a casualty clearing station as doctors rushed out to help the wounded, taking tablecloths and other things to help the victims alongside the emergency services. Thirteen passengers on the bus died, and many more were given urgent treatment by BMA staff members ahead of the arrival of the paramedics and first responders.
Nobody in the building was injured and the building received only superficial damage, mainly through pushed-back window frames (the glass at the front was protected with shatterproof film). A plaque in memory of the 13 people killed placed on the BMA House railings in Tavistock Square and a sundial in the Council Garden mark the day and time of the bombing.
Originally there was a throughway from Tavistock Square through the courtyard and building to Burton Street. Currently the BMA have restricted public access through here. Ian pointed out “rubber bricks” originally laid on the ground of the now enclosed passageway to help deaden the noise of horses walking through it. These bricks are now largely covered with raised flooring.
Ian stated that that the plan is to remove the later infilling and covering up done by BMA to bring the building back to something like the original Lutyens design. A garden to the side of the building is to be redesigned to match the original Lutyens design, which still fortunately has the original curved steps around the central pond.
Ian has a programme – which he says could take until 2045 to complete – to reverse major architectural wrongs. This could include adding secondary glazing to all the sash single-glazed windows and removing the antiquated oil boilers and heating system to ensure the building complies with modern environmental efficiency requirements.