The settlers’ home at the settlers’ home: Eileen Chanin, ‘Australia House: shaping Dominion status in the imperial capital, 1907-63’, in Alex Bremner , Daniel Maudlin (eds), Inner empire: Architecture and Imperialism in the British Isles, 1550-1950, Manchester University Press, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

The settlers’ home at the settlers’ home: Eileen Chanin, ‘Australia House: shaping Dominion status in the imperial capital, 1907-63’, in Alex Bremner , Daniel Maudlin (eds), Inner empire: Architecture and Imperialism in the British Isles, 1550-1950, Manchester University Press, 2024

23Nov24

Excerpt: Australia House was the first of London’s so-called Dominion Houses, those High Commission buildings that housed offices for the governments of Britain’s self-governing colonies, or ‘Dominions’, as they were known from 1907.1 These buildings opened in central London from 1918. To federationists of the New Imperial era, who held hopes of uniting a Greater Britain, these prominent semi-public government buildings materially expressed the empire (much like the Greenwich Meridian confirmed London’s central world position). More than the ‘nerves of empire’ (over 121,000 miles of submarine telegraph cable linking the Britannic world), these prominent buildings embodied the connectedness of a hoped-for ‘imperial commonwealth’ to London as ‘the “heart” of the imperial organism’.2 In the first quarter of the twentieth century, imperialists believed that the Dominions would be the key to maintaining British power. Thus, these ‘Empire Houses’ also became a key part of London’s transformation when it was ascendant as a self-consciously financial, imperial, and regal capital. Architectural landmarks occupying prime sites, designed by eminent architects , and characterised by a high order of finish, they invested London with an imperial character, even long after the term ‘British Dominions’ applied in the process of decolonisation. The Dominion houses reveal, as Alex Bremner has argued, how enmeshed were London-centric and Dominion conditions and experience.

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