{"id":104905,"date":"2026-09-21T05:00:51","date_gmt":"2026-09-21T09:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=104905"},"modified":"2026-09-20T17:45:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-20T21:45:27","slug":"the-completion-of-the-parkinsonian-cycle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/the-completion-of-the-parkinsonian-cycle\/","title":{"rendered":"“The completion of the Parkinsonian cycle”"},"content":{"rendered":"

In The Critic<\/em>, Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri<\/a> shows how Parkinson’s Law still applies long after C. Northcote Parkinson’s work:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

“Admiralty Arch” by Leonard Bentley<\/a> is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 <\/a>.<\/p><\/div>\n

In 1958, C. Northcote Parkinson, a prescient observer of bureaucracies, noted how perfection of planned layout is achieved only by public institutions on the point of collapse. Parkinson\u2019s observation is prima facie<\/em> paradoxical. Yet when an institution is growing during an exciting time of expansion, even adventure, there is little time to design the perfect headquarters. That luxury is afforded later, when all the important work has been completed.<\/p>\n

Take St Peter’s Basilica, for example. It was designed only after the political power of the Papacy had been significantly curtailed. Or the Palace of Nations, opened in 1936, when the League of Nations’ failure as an institution was already evident. Even Buckingham Palace was expanded at a time when the monarch had assumed a rather ceremonial role in the constitution.<\/p>\n

I’ve written about Parkinson and his sardonic observations in these august pages before, but what brought him to my mind again last week was the sight of the renovated Admiralty Arch. Parkinson might have traced the long arc of decline as far as decay but stopped short of its final stage. We may rejoice, for we have now arrived at the terminus: once a building has become both perfect and symbolic, it is at last available to be sold off for a song or leased out. We might call this the completion of the Parkinsonian cycle.<\/p>\n

Admiralty Arch is a familiar fixture of the London landscape. Raised at the initiative of King Edward VII in memory of his mother, it became the home of Britain’s naval command. It was where Sir Winston Churchill designed his not-always-successful naval expeditions. It will soon open its doors again as a new member of the Waldorf Astoria hotel family. Some connection with the past will be at least retained through the Pol Roger champagne served at its bar.<\/p>\n

What is happening in the Mall is symbolic of a wider drift. Half a mile down the road, the Old War Office in Whitehall was converted (guess what?) into a luxury hotel. In Covent Garden the old cells of Bow Street are also now a hotel curiosity. The grand County Hall, which continues to stare somewhat antagonistically across the Thames at Parliament, now welcomes not county councillors but visitors as a hotel and, at least more imaginatively, an aquarium.<\/p>\n

If luxury hotels are not your cup of tea, fret not, for the tyranny of “adaptive reuse” has a downmarket cousin. The humbler ruins of Middle England have been put to new purposes. A former British Home Stores \u2014 that cathedral of the affordable cardigan \u2013 in Slough was discovered last year to have been converted into a huge marijuana farm. Seventeen hundred plants thrived under grow-lamps in the same aisle where once school uniforms could be purchased, whilst the cultivators were dozing on a mattress by the fire exit. At least the building was, in the developer’s immortal phrase, “brought back into use”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In The Critic, Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri shows how Parkinson’s Law still applies long after C. Northcote Parkinson’s work: In 1958, C. Northcote Parkinson, a prescient observer of bureaucracies, noted how perfection of planned layout is achieved only by public institutions on the point of collapse. Parkinson\u2019s observation is prima facie paradoxical. Yet when an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[356,4],"tags":[350,30,326],"class_list":["post-104905","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-britain","tag-london","tag-navy","tag-parkinsonslaw"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-ri1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104905","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104905"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104905\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104907,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104905\/revisions\/104907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104905"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104905"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104905"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}