LONDON - The legendary Scotland Yard is on the move. London's police authorities, short of cash, have announced that the city force is to leave its current headquarters and decamp to smaller premises.
Scotland Yard! The very name evokes swirling fogs, Jack the Ripper, and Sherlock Holmes outwitting the bumbling Inspector Lestrade.
As London's Metropolitan Police itself boasts, “it has featured in almost every famous policing story over the past 180 years.â€
The reality is more mundane. In 1967, soon after the fog - read “smog†- was banished by a tough anti-pollution law, the “Met†moved to its present headquarters, a glass-fronted block with all the charm of an insurance company office in a suburban business park.
In the spirit of the age, as Clyde H. Farnsworth wrote for The New York Times at the time, the police hired a public relations expert to revamp the Yard's image, including designing sassy new uniforms for its women officers.
Visitors wanting to recapture a more traditional feel are best advised to press their noses to the gates of the old Scotland Yard, a fortresslike riverside Victorian pile that housed the Met from 1890, and now provides offices for legislators at the nearby Parliament.
The 1967 upgrade to what is officially known as New Scotland Yard reflected Britain's embrace of what Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister of the day, described as the “white heat of technology†in the latter half of the 20th century.
The latest move reflects more the budget-paring preoccupations of the 21st.
The police and the London mayor's office this week invited architects from around the world to submit plans for a new headquarters, to be housed at an old police station in the same Westminster neighborhood.
Stephen Greenhalgh, the deputy mayor for policing and crime, said the move was part of a strategy of selling off part of the Met's property holdings that would generate the equivalent of at least $450 million.
The money would be “plowed back into the remaining buildings so that a rundown, largely Victorian police estate is fit for the 21st century,†Mr. Greenhalgh said.
A $90 million saving in building operating costs would pay for 1,200 additional police officers on the streets of London within three years, he said.
That is potentially good news for Londoners, at least the law-abiding ones, and for members of the Met who last year took part in the largest street protest by police officers against budget cuts.
Although the London force has around 26,000 officers, in many districts the traditional “bobby on the beat†is now almost as rare as a London fog.
A recent mission statement from the mayor's office pledged to create “a Metropolitan Police Service that becomes the U.K.'s most-effective, most-efficient, most-respected; even most-loved police force.â€
However, the Metropolitan Police Federation, the London police officers' union, said the mayor's plan to enhance visible, local policing was “in keeping with the reductions all round which are the hallmark of austerity Britain.â€
If the Met still finds itself short of money, even after the savings promised from the Scotland Yard move, it could always consider ramping up the marketing of its world-famous brand.
Taking its lead from the New York Police Department, it already has licensing deals with toy makers to sell “Scotland Yard†forensic kits for 10-year-olds and “Scotland Yard†jigsaw puzzles.
On a dedicated Web site, the Met invites private businesses to associate themselves with a brand “legendary around the globe for strength, courage and steely determination.â€
What Sir Robert Peel, who founded the Met in 1829, would have made of it is anybody's guess.
