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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.
Lubetkin's health centre of 1938, built by a borough that decided the poor should be treated in a building as good as this.
Modern movement
Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton group built it between 1935 and 1938 for the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury, which was one of the poorest in London and commissioned one of the best buildings in it. Reinforced concrete, faced in faience tiles and glass brick, on an H-shaped plan whose two wings splay outwards so that their walls are not parallel and the corridors inside them taper.
The front is the argument. A canted entrance block of deeply recessed glazed brick runs the width of a convex facade, divided by slim tile-faced piers under a plain tiled entablature that doubles as the parapet of a roof-terrace planter. You come in up a straight ceremonial ramp - a ramp, in 1938, to a clinic - through fully glazed bronze doors framed in marble and glass blocks. The name is painted across the first-floor parapet in trompe l'oeil shadowed lettering, and the list entry is explicit that this is not decoration but an important part of the design statement.
Inside, the principal space is a waiting hall across the whole centre block, on piloti. It is still a health centre, so the inside belongs to its patients; the outside is what there is to see, and it has been Grade I since 1972.
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Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL. Hours change often, so check before making a journey.