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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.
Horace Jones built three markets for the City and then drew Tower Bridge, and Leadenhall is the one you can still walk through.
Victorian & EdwardianYou can go insideFree
Also in Food Markets and Harry Potter and Roman London.
Horace Jones was the City of London's architect for twenty-three years, and three of its markets are his: Smithfield, Billingsgate and Leadenhall. Tower Bridge was his last drawing and he died before it opened. The profession has never quite rated him - an engineer with a drawing board rather than an artist, the charge goes - and those three markets are the answer to it.
The Gracechurch Street front is the part most people walk past without looking up. It is a double-height opening between tall gabled blocks of red brick and Portland stone, done in a seventeenth-century Dutch manner that has nothing whatever to do with the iron behind it: a Victorian architect's idea of what a City street should look like, put in front of a shed.
And the colours are not Victorian, whatever they look like. The whole thing was repainted across 1990 and 1991 to pull the detail of the ironwork back out, a scheme that got a special mention at the Civic Trust Awards. It is that paint people photograph.
| Monday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
|---|---|
| Tuesday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Wednesday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Thursday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Friday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Saturday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
| Sunday | 10:00 – 18:00 |
Hours from OpenStreetMap.
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Photo by Diliff, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
Data is compiled from public sources including OpenStreetMap, under the ODbL.