Old in name, but not in nature

WHEN The Old War Office opens this winter, guests will find themselves sleeping in one of the landmarks of Edwardian Whitehall. Opened as Britain’s centre of military operations in 1907, its architecture is an opulent if slightly chaotic composition of columns, arches, rusticated masonry and corner turrets, bursting with splendid self-assurance: the equivalent of a military fanfare or grand review of the Fleet.

Here was an Imperial fanfare. Here were marble staircases, oak panelling and internal walls that required as much as 50 acres of plaster to cover them. On the music-hall stage, the cross-dressing singer Vesta Tilley sang. The army was popular; so, with what the called the ‘usually unresponsive man on the