Whether the departure is from a home or an office, there is often something melancholy about saying farewell to a place pregnant with memories. The Washington Post has only moved a few blocks to 13th and K Street NW this month, but for the generation of journalists who spent most of their working lives in the unlovely but iconic Post building at 15th and L Street, the move is such a moment, the end of an era and a reminder of the transience of things – in this case the transience of the days when newspapers were inner-city print factories.
In an unsentimental world, the old Post building is being reduced to rubble, while a swanky new piece of more modern real estate will soon rise in its place. But this was where, over months and years, two young reporters pieced together the most famous of all 20th-century journalistic investigations. The unravelling of the Watergate burglary’s White House connections, led by the Post’s Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and robustly protected by editor Ben Bradlee and owner Katherine Graham, climaxed in the one and only resignation of a US president in 1974. It elevated investigative journalism to an unprecedented position of global esteem, in whose reflected glow we all still bask a little.
The demolition of the Post’s famous open-plan newsroom is a glumly well-trodden path for industrial-era newspapers. After nearly a century, in 1970 the Guardian left its own Victorian offices in Manchester’s Cross Street on a journey to becoming a digital news organisation based in London, New York and Sydney, and publishing not each morning but every minute of every day. The Times, abandoning Printing House Square in 1974, did something similar in London. Both buildings were promptly demolished. The Scotsman, by contrast, moved out of its marble-staircased headquarters on Edinburgh’s North Bridge at the end of the 20th century but the buildings are now a hotel. Visitors can sleep in luxury where hot metal type was once expertly assembled.
In the centres of formerly industrial cities are a multiplicity of buildings whose original function has become redundant or has developed in new ways. Railway stations, once embodiments of urban modernity and what Tony Judt called “neo-ecclesiastical monumentalism”, have become art galleries, as in Paris’s Quai d’Orsay, or conference centres, like Manchester Central. Corn exchanges like the one in Leeds, modelled on the Paris Bourse, have not seen a grain of wheat traded in decades. Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, where suffragettes once heckled Sir Edward Grey and where Sir John Barbirolli made the Halle into one of the great orchestras of the world, is now a hotel. Department stores that were the focus of a city, like Lewis’s in Liverpool with its Jacob Epstein statue over the entrance, now a Lidl, and Newcastle’s art deco Co-operative store, another hotel these days, are places of civic ghosts and memories too.
Bank buildings have become bars. Football grounds have been turned into prestige housing. All things must pass. Buildings that have outlived their purpose have no right to be preserved perpetually in a Prince Charles-style attempt to stop the clock on history. Sentimentality about an imagined past is a British disease. For all that, the emotional link between a building like the Washington Post’s and the people who once worked there will live on, for years to come.
