I was walking along Queen Anne’s Gate and was struck by this view of Basil Spence’s Ministry of Justice looming above the parapets of the terraced eighteenth-century houses like an escaped sputnik:-
It encouraged me to pay a bit more attention to the comic plasterwork figures and the statue of Queen Anne:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Absolutely superb spotting Charles!
It’s not, in my view, one of Spence’s best buildings, but he’s someone whose reputation has slipped a little – wrongly, I think. While you are wandering round there, how about looking again at St James’s Underground Station, and the Epsteins above it?
I learned recently that students at the AA in the late 1950s were discouraged from admiring Spence’s work as too establishment and that prejudice maybe lingers. Charles