The Marsham Towers were three government buildings at the corner of Marsham Street and Great Peter Street in Westminster, London. They served as the headquarters of the Department of the Environment.
The Marsham Towers were three government buildings at the corner of Marsham Street and Great Peter Street in Westminster, London. They served as the headquarters of the Department of the Environment.
The redevelopment of the site was long planned. The site was originally a gas works and had first included two gas holders (built 1875), renovated in World War 2 for use as bomb shelter 'citadels'—the North Rotunda and the South Rotunda. A new 'steel-framed building' was also added in 1940/41. Both rotundas were designed to survive the impact of a 500 lb bomb and had 12-foot-thick (3.7 m) concrete roofs. In 1943 the lowest level of the North Rotunda (codenamed Anson) was kitted out as the reserve to the Cabinet War Rooms. [2] The previous reserve Paddock in Dollis Hill was seen to be unsatisfactory and too far from Whitehall. [3]
By the early 1960s, the increasing numbers of civil servants led to the commissioning of Eric Bedford (1909–2001), chief architect for the Ministry of Public Building and Works, to design a headquarters building for three separate ministries, the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, the Ministry of Transport and the Ministry of Public Building and Works. His design, published in 1963, placed three twenty-storey slab blocks parallel north to south on top of a three-storey podium slab raised on stilts. Each tower had exposed concrete framing, being built in a new 'box-shell' system which mixed pre-cast concrete and on-site construction. They were 216.5 feet (66.0 m) tall. [4] The towers incorporated the rotundas in the base and were completed in 1971. [5]
The rotundas were used as a communications centre and a civil service sports club, amongst other things. By the time the towers were complete, the three separate ministries had merged into the Department of the Environment, and having separate towers proved inefficient. The bland frontage of the blocks, described in Nikolaus Pevsner's architectural guides as "the very image of faceless bureaucracy", [6] was much criticised and local people nicknamed them "the three ugly sisters". [7]
Michael Heseltine announced on 6 February 1992 that he proposed to knock the building down. In 1996 an architectural competition was held for a mixed-use replacement but did not produce a clear outcome. Eventually it was decided to build a replacement for the Home Office on the site and the towers were taken down in 2002/03. The site is now occupied by Sir Terry Farrell's new building at 2 Marsham Street, which the Home Office first occupied in February 2005 and a housing development containing just over 100 apartments called New Palace Place. [8]
The Shell Centre in London is the global headquarters of oil major Shell plc. It is located on Belvedere Road in the London Borough of Lambeth. It is a prominent feature on the South Bank of the River Thames near County Hall, and now forms the backdrop to the London Eye.
Balfron Tower is a 26-storey residential building in Poplar, located in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, London. Built in a Brutalist style, it forms part of the Brownfield Estate, an area of social housing between Chrisp Street Market and the A12 northern approach to the Blackwall Tunnel. It was designed by Ernő Goldfinger in 1963 for the London County Council, built 1965–67 by the GLC, and has been a listed building since 1996. Balfron Tower is stylistically similar to Goldfinger's later Trellick Tower in North Kensington, within West London
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Ronan Point was a 22-storey tower block in Canning Town in Newham, East London, that partially collapsed on 16 May 1968, only two months after it opened. A gas explosion blew out some load-bearing walls, causing the collapse of one entire corner of the building; four people died and 17 were injured. The nature of the failure led to a loss of public confidence in high-rise residential buildings, and major changes in British building regulations resulted.
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Leadenhall Street is a street in the City of London. It is about 1⁄3-mile-long (0.54 km) and links Cornhill in the west to Aldgate in the east. It was formerly the start of the A11 road from London to Norwich, but that route now starts further east at Aldgate.
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2 Marsham Street is an office building on Marsham Street in the City of Westminster, London, and headquarters of the Home Office and Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, departments of the British Government, since March 2005. Before this date the Home Office was located at 50 Queen Anne's Gate. It has also housed the headquarters of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs since 2018.
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South Quay Plaza is a residential-led development under construction on the Isle of Dogs, London, England, within the borough of Tower Hamlets. It is being developed by Berkeley Group Holdings and was designed by architect Foster + Partners. The site of the development lies to the immediate north of Marsh Wall and to the immediate south of the financial district Canary Wharf. The entire development is scheduled for completion in 2028.
Bowater House was a 17-floor office block at 68 Knightsbridge in London SW1, completed in 1958. The building occupied a site between Knightsbridge and South Carriage Road, at the southern edge of Hyde Park. It was demolished in 2006 and redeveloped by Candy & Candy to create One Hyde Park.
Eric Bedford CB CVO was a twentieth-century British architect whose most famous work is London's BT Tower. In 1961, construction began on what was then known as the Post Office Tower, with Bedford as Chief Architect and G R Yeats as senior architect in charge. Completed in 1965, with a height of 177 metres (581 ft), it became for a time London's tallest building.
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