The Ministry of Defense building can justly be described as imposing, but not to everyone’s tastes, becoming known as the ‘Whitehall Monster‘ It was described by architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner as a ‘monument of tiredness‘.
The building was constructed between 1939 and 1959 on part of the former site of the Palace of Whitehall. It started life as the Air Ministry and was also used by the Board of Trade before the MOD took it over in 1964. The site is around seven acres in area and sits over some of the former palace’s state apartments including Cadogan House. The building still retains Cadogan House’s 16th-century Tudor brick-vaulted wine cellar. The seventy-foot, twenty-one-meter-long cellar consists of 10 bays with 4 octagonal piers and had been incorporated into Whitehall Palace by Henry VIII.
The two statues that adorn the entrance were sculpted by Sir Charles Wheeler and weigh 40 tonnes each. They were named Earth and Water however during the 1950s they were known as Mr & Mrs Parkinson after Cyril Northcote Parkinson, the Board of Trade civil servant who devised Parkinson’s Law which states “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion“.
More recently MOD staff referred to the statues as the two fat ladies after Clarissa Dickson-Wright and Jenifer Paterson
A LONDON MISCELLANY 