An organisation finding its home
While the programme was being drafted, the practical questions were equally pressing. A February 1946 Minute Sheet from C. Purves to Dr. Kotschnig, noted soberly that the accommodation at Nos. 46 and 47 Belgrave Square, the Preparatory Commission’s own London offices, chosen on the assumption the Secretariat would number 50 to 60 persons, was “neither sufficient nor of a nature to suit a Secretariat” now expected to reach 80 to 90 staff. At least fifteen officers would require separate offices. The problem of the telephone alone, under “conditions of shortage of labour and material,” would take considerable time to resolve.
UNESCO’s seat had in fact been fixed in Paris from the outset: a Resolution adopted at the close of the London Conference on 16 November 1945, the same session that adopted the Constitution itself, had already stipulated that the Organisation’s seat would be in Paris. The question at Belgrave Square, then, was not whether but when: an earlier letter, from 1946, complained in some detail of the state of the new office at No. 47 Belgrave Square, while another, dated 1945, records the tentative consideration of No. 49 Grosvenor Square as an alternative London base — both concerning the Commission’s temporary London premises, well ahead of the move itself.
