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Buildings where the building is the reason to go: the inside-out, the Art Deco, the concrete, and the ones that make no sense at all until somebody explains them.
A cylinder made round because the aerials needed it, with the gear that turned its restaurant still sitting under floor 34.
TowersModern movement
Proposed in 1954 and built between 1961 and 1965 by the Ministry of Public Building and Works - Eric Bedford as chief architect, G. R. Yeats the senior architect in charge, S. G. Silhan on the structure and J. J. Taylor on the services, with Kenneth Holloway for the Post Office. The shaft is 582 feet of reinforced concrete with a 40-foot mast above it, about 620 feet in all, standing on a raft foundation twenty feet deep. It is round for a reason rather than a style: microwave dishes have to point in every direction, and a cylinder gives them the least wind to fight.
It reads as three buildings stacked on each other, and the list entry says the design meant it to. The lower sixteen floors - ventilation, batteries and refrigeration below, racks of radio equipment above - sit behind a triple curtain wall of stainless steel glazed with Antisun. Above them the aerial floors are open galleries, left exposed so that dishes could be shifted and replaced; they had to be mounted between 365 and 475 feet up to clear the ground and the buildings around. Most have gone now. Then the top: a cantilevered drum about 22 feet across with walls a foot thick, flaring to 35 feet at its base where they are two, carrying six staggered levels.
Those were the public floors - an observation deck on three of them, a cocktail bar, a kitchen, and on floor 34 a restaurant 65 feet across that turned once every 25 minutes. The public have not been up since 1980 and the rooms have been refitted, so none of the original finishes survive. The rotation gear does: it is still there under floor 34. And at the bottom, in the basement, the pyramid the whole tower stands on is exposed, and is part of what is protected.
BT sold it to MCR Hotels in February 2024 for £275 million. Plans lodged in September 2026 would turn levels seven to twenty-three into some four hundred hotel rooms, four to a floor around the core, and open the 35th floor to the public again; the work is announced to begin in 2029 with an opening targeted for 2033. Until then it is a building to look at rather than go up, which is what it has been for most of its life.
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