No time for Hitler

THERE is a story that if Hitler had invaded London he would have claimed the  Senate House as his headquarters. Hitler, supposedly, had his eye on that monolith among university buildings.
          The skyscraper was built in the 1930s, when art deco was innocent and beautiful.  In that period, buildings mighty and authoritarian in stonework and  steel were raised in other countries in the name of dictators light-headed with a taste for invasion which led to the Second World War.
          The Senate House design, at least on the outside, inspired George Orwell's Ministry of Truth in his futuristic satire Nineteen Eighty-Four. It looks just the right building for your movie or TV drama about a rising tyrant or a secret police headquarters. I wish the management well in achieving a decent income in film location fees, which perhaps has already happened.
          However, the story of Hitler coveting Senate House as his London headquarters is an urban myth. A spokesman for Senate House Library, who gave me a guided tour, said the fiction arose in the nineteen-sixties, long after Hitler was dead.
          'Hitler probably didn't even know there was a Senate House,' the spokesman said. The building was finished in nineteen thirty-seven, only two years before the beginning of the Second World War. It was bombed during the War, and repaired, and its sturdy structure  reduced the effect of the Nazi bombs.