Grosvenor Square, list entry 1000807
Listing for the square.
Open the sourceThe listing text is our best single source for the old building, and a 2024 article gives us a scholarly route into the 1968 protest. For the move we depend on official and press accounts.
1.Little America
The American link to Grosvenor Square goes back to 1785, when John Adams, the first minister to the Court of St James’s, rented number 9. In the Second World War General Eisenhower’s headquarters were at number 20, and the square became known as “Little America”. The gardens were replanned in 1947–48 as a memorial to Franklin Roosevelt.
Grosvenor Square
The Embassy’s own history. We read it as a story the Embassy tells about itself.
Open the source2.Saarinen’s building
A competition in 1955 among eight entrants was won by Eero Saarinen. The embassy was built in 1957–60 with Yorke, Rosenberg and Mardall as the UK executive architects. It is faced in Portland stone over an exposed concrete diagrid, with a 35-foot gilded eagle by Theodore Roszak. Historic England listed it at Grade II in 2009, calling it Britain’s first modern embassy.
United States of America Embassy, list entry 1393496
The listing text, with the design history and the 1968 reference.
Open the sourceUS Embassy building in Mayfair listed at Grade II
Campaigning group’s account of the listing.
Open the source3.17 March 1968
The Vietnam Solidarity Campaign marched to the embassy on 17 March 1968 and the day ended in clashes with mounted police. Film exists in commercial archives, so we may have to link out rather than embed it. The National Archives lists a Security Service and Metropolitan Police file on the demonstrations (HO 325/141), but it is retained by the department and not open. Jac St John’s 2024 article in Contemporary British History examines the policing of the demonstration.
Anti-Vietnam War demonstrations: reports from Security Service and Metropolitan Police (HO 325/141)
Catalogue entry for a file that is still retained.
Open the sourceJac St John, ‘Consolidating “traditional methods” of public order policing’ (2024)
Peer-reviewed article on the 1968 demonstrations and the response of the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police.
Open the sourceGrosvenor Square Vietnam War protest, London, 1968
Archive film catalogue entry. Licensed footage.
Open the source4.The move to Nine Elms
The decision to move was made in 2008 and the new embassy opened in January 2018. KieranTimberlake designed a 12-storey glass building with a pond or moat and gardens. The old building was sold to Qatari Diar and converted into a hotel.
Embassy of the United States, London (monograph)
The State Department’s account of the new building.
Open the sourceTrump UK visit: who really sold the US embassy?
Press account of the sale.
Open the sourceWhy it matters now
The move shows how security has changed the way states occupy a capital, and the old building’s conversion to a hotel shows what happens to a listed landmark when its purpose goes. The 1968 protest also feeds into continuing debates about public order policing and surveillance.
Bibliography
- St John, Jac, ‘Consolidating “traditional methods” of public order policing: the response of the Home Office and the Metropolitan Police to mass demonstrations in 1968’, Contemporary British History 38:2 (2024), 270–98.
- Vinen, Richard, The Long ’68: Radical Protest and Its Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2018).
- Ali, Tariq, Street Fighting Years: An Autobiography of the Sixties (London: Collins, 1987). A participant’s account, so a source as well as a book to read.
- Merkel, Jayne, Eero Saarinen (London: Phaidon, 2005).
- Reynolds, David, Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942–1945 (London: HarperCollins, 1995).
Image credits
2002-04-Botschaft-der-USA-in-London-Eero-Saarinen-24-Grosvenor-Square.jpg, Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2002-04-Botschaft-der-USA-in-London-Eero-Saarinen-24-Grosvenor-Square.jpg). Photograph by Gunnar Klack, 2002. Licence on the Commons page: CC BY-SA 4.0.
