-Caveat Lector- Euphorian spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.
To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk Fortress America Completed during the Kennedy era, the US embassy in London was designed to be open and inviting - people were encouraged to drop in to its library, and public jazz concerts were a regular feature. But then came the Vietnam war protests, the anti-capitalists and, finally, September 11. Now it is closed off from the rest of the city, ID cards are mandatory for locals and armed police are everywhere. Andy Beckett reports from Grosvenor Square Andy Beckett Thursday October 24 2002 The Guardian Culross Street and Blackburne's Mews are two fairly typical streets in Mayfair in central London. Their slim terraced houses are old and picturesque but slightly lifeless. Some of their owners have other homes abroad. Prospective residents with an eye on one of the corner properties will need £6m. Until about a year ago, the main local issues were parking and taxis using the two streets as a shortcut. Occasionally a few shouts might drift over from Grosvenor Square next door, where the American embassy is, when there was a protest of some sort. But the embassy had been there for decades, its familiar boxy grey silhouette in plain view every time people opened their front doors, and Mayfair residents tend to keep their political sympathies to themselves. As one Culross Street homeowner puts it: "Nobody even gave the embassy a thought." Then last September, within days of the attacks on New York and Washington, police checkpoints appeared halfway along Culross Street and at both ends of Blackburne's Mews. The outside world disappeared behind riot barriers, temporary fencing and waist-high concrete blocks. Inside the checkpoints, officers with guns and restless gazes began patrolling, day and night. Politely but firmly, every visitor to the two streets was required to explain themselves. And every resident, uniquely for Britain, was asked to carry an identity card. These security measures have remained in place, without ever being publicly requested by the United States, ever since. Local reactions are mixed. "It's really diminished our quality of life," one resident says, "I just feel trapped. It is a bit like Colditz." Other people like the absence of crime and traffic, and the sudden surplus of parking spaces. Either way, the importance of the Grosvenor Square embassy, and all that this says about America's place in the world, and about the relationship between Britain and America in particular, has been vividly demonstrated. There are plenty of other ways of measuring it. No other embassy in London has such a familiar design or location. The American ambassador's residence, a short drive north of Grosvenor Square in Regent's Park, has the largest private garden in the capital after Buckingham Palace. Five of America's London representatives have been elected president. Fifteen thousand official visitors from the United States have been received by the embassy in the past year - more than at any other American embassy - including George Bush, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell. And last autumn, as the checkpoints were going up in Culross Street and Blackburne's Mews, 50,000 people came to Grosvenor Square to pay their respects to the dead of September 11. The embassy's status is also acknowledged by its critics. "It radiates power," says Tariq Ali, the veteran leftwing activist, whose own profile in Britain still owes much to his involvement in the famous anti-Vietnam protests in Grosvenor Square in the late 60s. "The embassy has become even more of a beehive than it was in the cold war days ... more of an imperial fortress." Anti-capitalist marches in London always become more animated when they swing towards the embassy, with its rooftop American eagle the size of a minibus. Anti-nuclear protesters and environmentalists, opponents of American foreign policy and the American death penalty, pacifists and holders of vigils for the rights of native Americans - all gather instinctively in Grosvenor Square. Less liberal foes of the US government may dream of more dramatic actions: last month, it was widely speculated that the would-be hijacker of a Ryanair flight from Sweden to Britain intended to crash the jet into the embassy, using its rooftop eagle to identify it from the air. With America and Britain currently in close and controversial alliance against Iraq, the embassy has acquired even greater significance. "When the whiff of war is in the air," says the historian of British government Peter Hennessy, "The alliance between Britain and America becomes almost palpable. I was in our embassy in Washington in 1991, during the last Gulf war. It felt as if the two systems were fused." The embassy stands on a concrete plinth at the western end of Grosvenor Square, still proud and raw-looking amid the area's Georgian buildings over 40 years after its construction. Its ring of recently improvised new fortifications occupies wide sweeps of road and pavement, generating eddies of congestion in the surrounding streets. And all around the square itself, with its clipped grass and clear sightlines, there is what the embassy enthusiastically refers to as "community policing": if you stand and look at the embassy for more than a minute or two, a policeman with a large machine gun will approach and inquire as to your intentions. Behind the embassy's long rows of windows, there are nine floors, three of them underground. They contain a miniature version of official Washington. "The London embassy now," writes the recent former ambassador Raymond Seitz in his memoirs, "is less like a traditional diplomatic post and more like a branch office of the federal government." There is a staff of 750, and two dozen departments from immigration to defence to intelligence. It has its own convenience store, private security and detachment of United States marines. The embassy describes its overall budget as "huge". There was a time, though, when the American diplomatic presence in Britain was more modest. It started in 1785, in a rented house at the opposite end of Grosvenor Square. Until the late 19th century, relations between the young republic and the world's then dominant power were not sufficiently important to be handled by an ambassador; instead the embassy was overseen by a lower-ranking official. This diplomatic balance of power, like the wider one between Britain and the United States, did not shift completely until the second world war. Then, as Britain became dependent on American military assistance, the buildings around Grosvenor Square began to fill up with American army planners. After General Eisenhower set up his headquarters, in a block that houses American naval officers to this day, the square became known locally as "Eisenhowerplatz". When the war ended, the American government, aware of its new status as a superpower, embarked on a programme of embassy-building around the world - "the most ambitious since Hadrian", according to the British architecture magazine Architectural Review. Grosvenor Square was the obvious place for a new London embassy. There was only one obstacle: the Grosvenor Estate refused to let the Americans acquire the freehold on the site they had chosen, as was their practice with embassies, because, it has been said ever since, the Grosvenor family had had property in the United States confiscated two centuries earlier during the American War of Independence. A lease of 999 years was granted instead. To take account of British sensitivities, the design of the new building was chosen in a public competition, the first ever held for an American embassy. The winning architect was Eero Saarinen, a Finnish-American with a history of erecting streamlined, slightly utopian buildings in the American midwest. At least at first, he did not intend the London embassy to be a fortress. From the late 40s until the early 60s, the look of new American diplomatic buildings reflected the country's desire at the time to be seen as an open, outward-looking superpower. Embassies were built with glass walls and generous lobbies, multiple entrances and public rooms for exhibitions. "Security was not a concern," says Jane C Loeffler, an authority on American embassy architecture. "The London building was as welcoming as a museum or a cultural centre." The embassy, completed in 1960, was not one of Saarinen's best structures. Its facades were too cluttered and British architecture critics found the design brash and unappealing. Yet for its first few years, the life of the embassy retained a certain idealism. The British public were encouraged to drop into the library and learn about America. There were jazz concerts and art shows. The energy and confidence of the Kennedy years, as many foreign liberals saw them at least, were on show behind the huge ground-floor windows. The embassy was best known for its queues for visas. Then came Vietnam. The worldwide shift in America's reputation was played out, with television cameras in attendance, on the neat lawns and pavements of Grosvenor Square. Ali and his fellow activists, he recalls in his memoirs, "dreamed of using the embassy telex to cable the US embassy in Saigon and inform them that pro-Vietcong forces had seized the premises in Grosvenor Square". Mounted police charges and mass arrests kept the demonstrators out of the embassy, but the image of the building was darkened for good. The architecture soon caught up: "1968 was the beginning of the closing off," says Loeffler. Public access to the embassy was reduced. The first barricades, thinly disguised as plant tubs, appeared in front of the main steps. In 1985, after the horrific bombing of the American embassy in Beirut, a new set of guidelines on embassy design brought the era of glass boxes and openness to a close. New embassies were to be out-of-town compounds, and windows were to be rationed according to a precise formula: no more than 15% of a wall was allowed to be glass. Some of these undiplomatic structures, hard to distinguish from the multiplying American military bases around the world, have since been built in the Middle East and other officially perilous places. Two years ago, it was rumoured that the London embassy might leave Grosvenor Square for a more open and easily defended location. The embassy says it "currently" has no such plans; Britain is a relatively friendly country, after all. Then again, a bomb attack on a fictitious United States embassy in London - with a more romantic Victorian building standing in for the existing grey box - featured earlier this year in an episode of an American television drama series called The American Embassy. And the state department in Washington, of which all American embassies are a part, concedes that the current building needs substantial renovation. Inside, the showpiece main lobby, all smooth pale stone and imitation gold, is still as silent and impressive as a bank vault. But the long corridors of offices upstairs are full of scuffed furniture, with old maps on the walls. The transparent security screens behind which the marine guards sit watching in their rolled-up shirtsleeves look more suited to a casino in 50s Las Vegas. Loeffler says the sheer amount of glass in the embassy may make it difficult to fortify much further: thickening the windows might over-burden the whole structure. The spokesman I meet plays down the need. Most of what the embassy does, he says with studied casualness, is "authentically boring and mundane". As the air-conditioning hums and no sound penetrates his office from the noisy Mayfair streets, he tells expertly-extended anecdotes about taking phonecalls from members of the public praising the good behaviour of American golfers in the Ryder Cup. Outside, pinned to the new fencing around the building, are notices informing people where to go for visas. Despite all the policemen, and the eagle on the roof, it is difficult to see the embassy as purely intimidating. In secretive Mayfair after all, with its private clubs and expensive hotels, the embassy is hardly the only place that wards off the curious. And these days, in some ways at least, the embassy's power may be diminishing. Apart from the ambassador, none of its staff is a political appointee. Most of their backgrounds are in the state department, cautious and moderate by reputation - and increasingly bypassed by an impatient Bush administration. Similarly, relations between the British and American governments are going through what Hennessy calls "one of the very personal periods", with direct contact between Downing Street and the White House further marginalising the embassy. In the current clamour of official statements about Iraq, the ambassador, William Farish, has been conspicuous by his silence. Even his grand residence in Regent's Park, for all its famed parties and presidential helicopters landing in the grounds, has become something of a liability: it is yards away from Regent's Park mosque. Perhaps the idea that Grosvenor Square is the centre of malign American influence on Britain is a comforting illusion for a certain kind of British radical. A reminder of more straightforward times before America became so ubiquitous in British politics and culture and everyday life that it became hard to resist or even notice. In Culross Street and Blackburne's Mews, none of the residents who criticise the embassy roadblocks thinks there is any chance of having them removed. They want them to be made permanent and more attractive. Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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