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The best architecture in London: 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.
The most expensive building in the world in 1929, and the address the BBC World Service broadcast from for seventy years.
Art Deco
Irving T. Bush, an American industrialist, built a trade centre at the foot of Kingsway and had an American design it: Harvey Wiley Corbett drew it, approval came in 1919, and it went up a wing at a time between 1925 and 1935. By 1929 it was being called the most expensive building in the world. The front is Portland stone with a monumental portico, two figures by Malvina Hoffman over the entrance, and cut into the stone beneath them the words 'To the friendship of English speaking peoples' - which was Bush's Anglo-American trade idea; the service that later broadcast from behind that stone spoke to the world in dozens of languages.
The BBC's European Service moved in during the winter of 1941, after Broadcasting House was bombed, and the World Service went on broadcasting from here until the noon news on 12 July 2012. King's College London took the lease in 2015 and now has all four wings. There is nothing to go in for. It was sited to close the view up Kingsway, and that is the length of street to look at it from.
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Photo by Frank Kovalchek, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.