Founding fathers

station—an ironic turn of events for someone who had already rescued an almost identical project from public opprobrium. Complainants warned that the new building would obstruct views of St Paul’s, damage it with its fumes, and even, bizarrely, dwarf it—from the far bank of the Thames. It must have been a fortune, then, that Scott ‘bore life’s triumphs and life’s trials with an unruffled serenity,’ as Sir Hubert Worthington wrote in 1960. Or perhaps he had fathomed what would eventually happen: that, as The Times put it in 1960, ‘when the station was built, little dislike of it was expressed’.

A project in which Scott did not succeed, however, was the overhauling of London’s traffic—which he must have felt keenly, not least because, belying his unprepossessing nature, he had a penchant for fast motors. He advocated a ‘drastic surgical operation’, according to a 1943 story in The Times, arguing, with Shakespeare, that ‘all things are ready if our minds be so’. But even the man that had managed to change an entire city’s views over power stations—twice—failed to sway the planners and, as he predicted, London’s traffic remains ‘muddle and chaos’ to this day.