The city grew dramatically only when first Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, then his wartime administration, and then the American captaincy of the West under Truman and Eisenhower led to an explosion in the size of the Federal Government. This growth took an essentially suburban form even quite close to the hub of government. Quintessential mid-twentieth-century Washington is made up of detached houses in dogwood-lined hilly streets. Not only are there virtually no even modestly high buildings, except across the Potomac in Alexandria, but there are hardly any carrefours which count as centres of animation and of which at least a hundred could be found in Paris. Nor is there any view that proclaims ‘you are in the centre of a great city’ with anything like the assurance that does, say, the approach to Central Station in Glasgow, either up from Broomielaw or across Gordon Street. The 1890s Central Hotel of uninspiring name but magnificent woodwork forms an important part of either view, and it is a minor tragedy that its decline should have left Glasgow, architecturally the finest Victorian city in the world, without a single good hotel of the epoch, whereas even Edinburgh has two. To have lost the St Enoch Station Hotel and the Grand at Charing Cross was, as Wilde might have made Lady Bracknell say, a misfortune, but effectively to lose the third points to carelessness, or at least to the disadvantages of breaking up and privatizing the old railway hotel chain.
I return for a moment to Washington where the suburban layout and the mono-cultural nature of the lifestyle (politics, politics all the way) make for provincialism, but are outweighed, although not by a wide margin, by the fact that the government of which it is the seat, and whose composition and doings are endlessly discussed, has been for the past fifty years the most powerful in the world. In Georgetown - the Kelvinside of Washington - the talk would be regarded by good West End standards as narrowly and unacceptably political, but it is at least conducted by the most famous journalists vying with the most favoured ambassadors to produce the most sophisticated witticisms about the most powerful cabinet officers to be found in any capital. And the talk is also perhaps less narrowly internal than political talk mostly is in London. That is one advantage of world leadership. Nevertheless, Washington remains essentially a one-purpose town.
The ‘one-purpose town’ aspect is repeated still more strongly in Bonn, which although a much more ancient city (2000 years old in 1989 so it was claimed, re-founded by the Emperor Julian in 359, and the birthplace of Beethoven 1411 years after that) is a much more recent and, it now again appears likely, a much more temporary capital. It has also been much more of a gimcrack capital, with most of the business of government of the world’s third most powerful economy being carried on - and very successfully carried on - in a collection of thoroughly second-rate 1950s and 1960s buildings. For forty years there has been a remarkable contrast between the capitals of the two German-speaking countries. In Vienna the affairs of the little Austrian Republic have been conducted from what are by and large the grandest official buildings of any capital city. There is a touch of bathos about the Hofburg without the Habsburgs. In Bonn, on the other hand, the business of the Federal Republic of Germany, long the middle kingdom of the European Community, now the hinge power of the whole continent which recent events again make the pivot of the world, is conducted in the most modest surroundings in Europe. Just as the Federal Republic of Germany has tried to exercise less political power than is commensurate with its economic strength, so on a diplomatic visit to Bonn one may look in vain for marble staircases, plumed guards of honour, screaming police escorts and glittering state banquets. Whether a move to Berlin will bring with it a return to Wilhelmine grandeur and a more assertive style of government is a fascinating and to some a worrying question.
On the whole I think not, although I do believe that the style of capital cities affects the style of the governments that operate within them. Thus I think it no accident that the three most centralized countries in Europe - Britain, France and Spain - are the three in which the governments operate from ‘hub of the country’ capitals - London, Paris and Madrid - which are the dominant cities, politically, socially, culturally, commercially. (It should be noted, however, that France and Spain are currently making strenuous efforts to decentralize themselves, whereas no such effort is visible in the British Government.) It is also noticeable that post-war Germany, when Berlin was split, operated with no city showing even a ‘conurbation’ population of two million, no city in other words amongst the first sixty or seventy in the world. The Federal Republic has been the most important and richest country but the one with the least big single city of the five big states of the European Community.