Nationhood and corporation - Australia House, the Strand, London WC2

An imposing home for the newly federated Commonwealth of Australia sought through its design and materials to celebrate themes of union with Britain and national self worth, as G. A. Bremner explains

- G. A. Bremner

ONCE seen, Australia House— occupying the eastern point of the Aldwych island site on the Strand—is not easily forgotten. Unlike the rambling Gothic pile of the Royal Courts of Justice by George Edmund Street nearby, it is not a huge building. Its powerfully articulated façade, conspicuously paraded on three sides, nevertheless makes for an impression that belies its stature. This attention-seeking demeanour, as it were, was intentional. Designed in 1911 by the Scottish architectural partnership of Alexander Marshall Mackenzie and his son, Alexander George Robertson, Australia House was designated the home of the High Commission of the recently federated Commonwealth of Australia (1901).

The architects’ goal was to create a building, ‘architecturally worthy of the headquarters of the Commonwealth in the capital of the Empire’. Being a newly independent Dominion, Australia was, indeed, keen to make its presence felt in the Imperial capital. The youthful nation believed it had much to offer and saw a magisterial piece of architecture as an effective way of advertising its importance to the continued primacy and economic prosperity of Greater Britain on the world stage. This was an entirely fitting aspiration, as the events of the First World War would prove.