Until seven years ago, one of the key centres of American power in Europe was a few minutes’ walk from the consumer frenzy of Oxford Street in London. Reassuring or enraging, depending on your view of American hegemony, for more than half a century the enormous US embassy, by far the largest in the capital, provided diplomatic, immigration and intelligence services – and an irresistible target for protesters. Its strikingly skeletal grey building on Grosvenor Square, which opened in 1960, became steadily more surrounded by fences, concrete blocks, bollards and other defences: signs of the increasing effort required to maintain the US’s worldwide ascendancy.
So it’s strange to visit the square and find that all the defences have gone. You can walk right up to the building, as protesters never managed to in large numbers, on to pavements once menacingly guarded by the embassy’s detachment of US marines, and peer through the rows of windows at an interior eerily transformed.
