Learning from Grosvenor Square: Preservation and Remembrance in London’s “Little America”

In the fall of 2016, a mixed-major cadre of students in an historic preservation class at Iowa State University traveled to London for ten days to participate in fieldwork at the soon-to-bevacated United States chancery at Grosvenor Square, Eero Saarinen’s modernist 1960 landmark. While the focus of the class was the tools and techniques for preservation documentation, the students’ perspective on their assignment quickly evolved, and the final project that emerged at the end of the semester reflected an experience that was broader, and far richer, than originally anticipated. While Saarinen’s chancery remained the focus of student activities, more revealing than the building itself was its changing urban context, as the American government prepared to vacate its long-standing home for a new chancery in a developing neighborhood south of the Thames. The students’ experiences and their class project suggest a potent form that preservation fieldwork might take in the future. This involves a shift from the study of the architectural landmark in isolation to a more holistic perspective that includes the broader neighborhood and its economic and demographic flows. In this particular case, the historic chancery’s capacity to anchor an “ethnic” neighborhood, the so-called Little America of Grosvenor Square, which had long been waning, became an opportunity for students to explore new ways of preservation and commemoration in a rapidly changing city.