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Keybridge House: the brutalist beauty that went down fighting

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When the wrecking ball goes in, it’s the building that meant to crumble. But in 2016, South Lambeth landmark Keybridge House put up such a fight it was the demolition firm that collapsed. A replacement company eventually got the job done but it took them 18 months and the client received a £12 million bill for razing a building that had cost only £7.5 million to build (albeit 40 years previously). ANDREW ROGERS presents the astonishing story of Keybridge House.

For four decades, a large stretch of South Lambeth Road was dominated by one 30-metre-tall assemblage of concrete, steel, and glass (and asbestos). Dubbed ‘the ugliest office in Britain’ in its declining years (most of them, some would say), Keybridge House was impossible to ignore. Depending on your point of view, it was either a blot on the landscape or a neglected architectural masterpiece, or both. It was also beloved by peregrine falcons, conspiracy theorists, and TV location managers in search of a vaguely dystopian urban environment.

Keybridge House entrance and tower. Photo: Adam Oliver.

But who built Keybridge House and why?

The future is telex…

Before email, before text messages, before fax machines, organisations needing to quickly send written messages to each other used telex (a contraction of telegraph exchange). You typed your message IN BLOCK CAPITALS using your telex machine’s built-in keyboard, dialled the recipient’s number (or went through an operator), and the message would print out IN BLOCK CAPITALS on the recipient’s telex machine. As a General Post Office (GPO) brochure put it, telex combined “the speed of the telephone with the authority of the printed word”. Although telex had been around since the 1930s, it wasn’t until automatic telex exchanges in 1958 that the service really started to take off. Within two years the domestic service was fully automatic with no intermediary required to make the connection. International subscriber dialling followed in 1962 and the result was a telex boom. Between 1964 and 1968 the number of telex subscribers in the UK almost doubled to 22,000 with no sign of slowing. According to an article in The Times on 29 July 1971, the number of international telex calls was expected to triple over the next seven years.

In the 1980s the fax machine would largely replace telex and in the 21st century email would provide the final nail in its coffin (BT stopped offering the telex service to new customers in 2004 and discontinued the service altogether in 2008). But back in 1970, telex was big business and to cope with demand, the General Post Office (GPO, then the custodian of the UK’s telecommunications) decided to build a new centre in London to house enough international telex equipment to handle three-quarters of the country’s anticipated 114 million calls a year by 1978, and a centre for interconnecting calls to and from domestic telex subscribers located in South East England.

‘Telex Teleprinter 15, with Girl Operating’, 1969. Photos: BT Archive.

The multi-purpose building would also accommodate:

  • Two automanual telephone exchanges to handle calls requiring the services of a telephone operator from customers in Pimlico, Nine Elms, Brixton and Vauxhall (around 450 telephonists handling 30,000 calls per day).
  • A telephone service centre headquarters for 200+ engineering staff involved in laying and repairing underground cables, repairing telephones, installing switchboards etc.

The site

Brand’s Mayfair Works AKA ‘the pickle factory’, 72-84 South Lambeth Road. Undated postcard.

The GPO paid £900,000 for a Victorian factory which had closed in 1967. Although the Mayfair Works at 72-84 South Lambeth Road was known to locals as ‘the pickle factory’, owners Brand & Co actually manufactured meat-based products such as beef tea, meat lozenges, and essence of chicken, the latter still immensely popular in south-east Asia.

The wrecking ball demolishing Brand & Co’s Mayfair Works in 1969. Photo: Post Office Telecommunications Journal, Vol. 22 No. 4, Winter 1970-71.

The architect

The GPO acquired the three-acre site, knocked down the factory and appointed as architects GW Mills and Associates of 54 East Street, Bromley and 3 Deanery Street London W1. In a comment on the Brutalism and Booze website Geoffrey Mills’s son Anthony remembers the moment in his childhood when the contract was being awarded and Postmaster General Tony Benn visited their house: ‘I was most uncharacteristically shouted at by my father, a kind and gentle man, for playing loud music upstairs while this critical visit occurred,’ he recalls.

If Geoffrey Mills has a broader architectural legacy, it is difficult to identify. The only other Mills building I’ve been able to find is the gently curving, 10-storey Renslade House office block in Exeter which was built between 1969 and 1971 at a cost of £750,000 – a tenth the scale of Keybridge House. Like Keybridge House, Renslade House was also described as ‘a blot on the landscape’ and even nominated ‘ugliest building in the southwest’ at one point but objections seem focussed on the inappropriateness of its riverside location. Renslade House still stands although barely recognisable since a 2017 retrofit to convert it into student accommodation. See more photographs of Renslade House before its 2017 renovation here.

G.W. Mills also designed Renslade House in Exeter. 2006 photo: Derek Harper / Renslade House, Exeter / CC BY-SA 2.0

Keybridge House design considerations

Geoffrey Mills’s design for Keybridge House featured a 76-metre 15-storey tower connected to a five-storey podium by a five-storey link. Although it was the tower that dominated the skyline, about three-quarters of the 770,000 sq. ft. floorspace would be contained in the basements and the podium block. The podium block’s large floor area was designed to house the telex equipment, offering flexibility of equipment layout and ease of maintenance.

One of the major factors influencing much of the design was the risk of flooding from the nearby River Thames. It was less than 20 years since devastating North Sea floods had ravaged the east coast in 1953. Work did not start on the Thames Barrier until 1974 and would not be completed until 1982. Moreover, the ground-water table was a mere four metres below the surface and the sub-basement would lie 12 metres underground.

The G.W. Mills architect models of Keybridge House, 1970. Photos: BT Archives

With the need to house and protect expensive mechanical machinery, Keybridge House need to be as much ark as building. A 12m-deep diaphragm wall was built to act as both retaining wall and waterproof barrier to reduce the water pressure on the sub-basement floor which itself acted as a slab foundation to the building above it. The entrance to the building was protected by a concrete wall faced in brickwork to protect the building should the river flood, and was protected by heavy floodgates which closed to form a V-shape with the pointed end facing towards the street to provide maximum strength against flood waters. Fire exits from the building to the street were noticeably higher than street level, with stairs down to the pavement, again in order to protect against flooding.

For more about the subterranean challenges, see ‘Keybridge House Tunnel’ by J.J. Pendegrass on page 34 of The Post Office Electrical Engineers’ Journal Vol 71 Part 1, April 1978.

LEFT: One of the heavy floodgates protecting the entrance to the Keybridge House site can be seen against the wall to the left. RIGHT: Fire exits from the Keybridge House podium were higher than street level to protect against flooding. Photographs: Google Streetview, Oct 2008

Herbert Wright offers some insights into the way Keybridge House’s form followed its function in his book London High: A guide to the past, present and future of London’s skyscrapers. He notes that 4.5-metre floor heights were required to accommodate the exchange equipment.

Because it housed a great deal of heat-generating mechanical equipment, much of Keybridge House’s design was dedicated to keeping it cool. The top floor of each block contained central air handling units which drew in ventilation air, distributing it through vertical ducts around the outside of the building. Additional air handling units within the vertical ducts provided additional cooling and ventilation where needed. The entire building was double-glazed.

An extensive basement and sub-basement were required to accommodate the 100 vehicles used by the engineering service centre and to store heavy hardware such as drums of cable, ducts, manhole frames and covers. A two-way ramp capable of taking large articulated lorries connected the ground floor to the basement stores and engineering vehicle parking areas, continuing down into the sub-basement to the car-parking areas. Diesel generators for standby power, ventilation plant and boiler house made up the remainder of the sub-basement approximately 40 feet below ground level.

The huge smokestacks were not in everyday use, but serviced the six massive Rolls Royce emergency generators in the sub-basement. These were tested monthly and, according to one eyewitness, the entire building vibrated when they were run up.

In a somewhat vain attempt to prevent the new building from overpowering the adjacent St Anne’s Church (renamed St Anne & All Saints in the early 1980s) a small plot of land was set aside for a landscaped garden between the church and Keybridge House.

The Keybridge House tower in 2015. The huge smokestacks served six massive emergency generators in the sub-basement. Photo: Andrew Rogers

Architectural impact

Even as it was being built, an item in the Business Diary of The Times on 25 July 1974 was describing Keybridge House as ‘rearing its ugly head over Vauxhall’ and that adjective was probably the single most commonly used description for the building’s entire lifetime (The Times also called it ‘infinitely depressing’).

In the 1983 edition of The Buildings of England – London 2: South, the tireless architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and/or his co-author Bridget Cherry stopped short of using the word ugly, describing Keybridge House as ‘a forbiddingly huge telecommunications centre with shiny channelled aluminium projections’.

The shine did not last long, thanks to BT’s neglect of the building. In 2007 Stephen Bayley wrote a coruscating article in The Observer asking: ‘Is this the ugliest office in Britain?’:

Like Ninfa and Monserrate, Keybridge House is in a state of decay. But unlike the great gardens near Rome and Lisbon, it does not evoke wistful thoughts on the pleasure of ruins. In fact, it makes the neighbours on London’s South Lambeth Road furious. This is because its decay is not a product of centuries of artful neglect, but of corporate arrogance, penny-pinching and slovenliness. And disturbing secrecy. Keybridge House looks like the bankrupt Department of Brain Chemistry in Magnitogorsk University during the most depressing years of the Brezhnev era. It is astonishing that it is a significant property asset of a FTSE 100 company.

In the same article, London Eye architect and Clapham resident Julia Barfield described Keybridge House as ‘hideous’. ‘The way it addresses the street is so offensive,’ she said.

Fans of architecture will happily debate whether a building is brutalist or not until the cows come home. Keybridge House certainly made extensive use of the unadorned concrete so characteristic of the style. But in the memory, it’s easy to picture it as being more concrete than it actually was: there was a great deal of glass and, of course, those once-shiny, soaring vertical steel panels. That said, the 21,000 cubic metres of concrete removed during demolition still sounds like a lot of concrete.

The massive smokestacks rising beyond the full height of the building anticipate the ‘inside-outness’ of the Renzo Piano/Richard Rogers Pompidou Centre in Paris by one year, and Rogers’ Lloyd’s building in London by some 15 years. As Herbert Wright concludes: ‘Keybridge House, like the Telecom Tower, is actually a foretaste of High Tech Post-Modernism.’

Construction

The plans were approved in 1971 and Taylor Woodrow appointed to turn them into reality. Completion was originally scheduled for 1975 although the building was not formally handed over until November 1977 (one source suggests construction did not even begin until 1975).

The project was not without drama. According to VauxhallHistory.org, the neighbouring St Anne’s Church suffered considerable damage: ‘When the builders were digging out the tower, foundations the church began to slip towards them. Large cracks formed in the church walls, holes appeared in the hall floor and some of the stairs became unsafe. In fact, the whole building required urgent repairs and redecoration but despite all the upheavals the church somehow was kept open and marriage ceremonies continued to be performed.’

Inside Keybridge House

The £7.5 million it cost to build Keybridge House was almost peanuts compared to the cost of the technology it housed.

Early in 1975, a £30 million contract for telex switching kit was controversially awarded to Anglo-Swedish company Thorn–Ericsson. The Post Office Corporation (formerly the GPO) claimed that no British supplier could manufacture the equipment fast enough, but stressed that at least £12 million of the contact would anyway be spent in the UK – £5 million on assembly work and £7 million on installation. Although noses were out of joint among both industry and workforce, the Post Office Engineering Union eventually gave its support, according to an article in The Times on 13 February 1975.

In February 1982 the world’s largest computer-controlled telex exchange costing £8 million was installed in Keybridge House by Plessey Controls for what was now British Telecom (renamed 1 October 1981 in advance of the 1984 privatisation). It provided an extra 11,000 connections to Europe with the capacity to be expanded to 27,000 lines. According to BT, the new exchange at Keybridge House offered ‘the newest, fastest and most reliable [telex] service in the world’.

Two years later, on 23 May 1984 the UK’s first digital international telephone exchange (the largest in the world) opened at Keybridge House. The Thorn–Ericsson equipment provided an extra 13,800 lines, and could handle up to 144,000 call attempts an hour, marking the beginning of a 10-year project to provide a digital service for all international services. Keybridge House continued to serve as an international exchange hub until 4 December 2014.

Until the mid-1980s Keybridge House also acted as a holding centre for cash containers from payphones on their way to BT’s counting house.  In its later years, it hosted much of BT Conferencing’s voice platform, and corporate data centre equipment. It also housed secure lines for the Metropolitan Police and the nearby security services.

Life inside Keybridge House

What was it like working inside Keybridge House? There are a few eyewitness accounts dotted around the internet. One commenter on the Brutalism & Booze blog recalls:

I had the absolute pleasure of working in Keybridge House for four months in early 2011 and I loved every minute of it. While it hasn’t been maintained as well as it might be, I always marvelled at and wondered how beautiful and space-age it must have seemed in the early seventies as you walked to the front door looking up at its gleaming stainless-steel panels and the huge rocks placed by the front door. Star Trek springs to mind. But the delights do not end at the front door. Once inside everything about it screams seventies at you from the semi-grand staircase with its chrome banister to the orange and brown colour scheme in the loos. Not to mention the plumbing of the day which struck me as so charming and the fantastic views over London from the canteen on the 14th floor with its ceiling-to-floor windows. The building is so much of its time I half expected the Brady Bunch to stage a performance at any moment.

Once you have seen all this you can easily imagine how Space Age it must have seemed to its first occupants as they walked towards the entrance. The glass, steel, rocks and the gleaming tower must have been an awesome sight in the morning sunshine back in the early seventies.

Another recalls:

Inside it was an amazing building, the views are incredible, and when I worked nights, seeing the sun come up from the tower block windows was a sight to behold.

In his book My GPO Family, GPO historian John Chenery writes about an opportunity he was given to visit Keybridge House in 2013:

Seemingly endless corridors lead off to lofty equipment floors, the size of football pitches, which were once crammed floor to ceiling with kit. […] With HV [high voltage] power risers and AHUs [Air Handling Units] at every turn, together with oversized goods lifts, the feeling was very much of an industrial working building, which sadly has been left behind in our rapidly changing modern world.

Places like Keybridge […] were hard, industrial buildings, built to maximise the much-needed equipment space, often on a comparatively tiny site. Constructed to satisfy planning constraints of the time, but with a 1970s grandeur of concrete and steel. Fabulous during their era, but utterly useless in the 21st century! I loved ’em.

In decline: film and TV

As the building hurtled towards obsolescence in the internet age, entire floors fell into disuse. These however did prove very attracted to one group of people – film and TV makers. On 29 November 2013 in the Evening Standard, reviewer Nick Curtis observed that Keybridge House had become ‘TV shorthand for institutional grimness’.

Series 3 of Luther climaxes on the roof of the Keybridge House tower in 2013. Copyright: BBC.

He wrote: ‘It’s where the last series of Luther [s3 ep4] came to a bloody end, and in last night’s enjoyably hokey BBC spy drama Legacy it stood in for MI6 and, in a wider sense, for the sheer awfulness of the Seventies.’

Keybridge House stood in for a 1961 hospital in the ITV drama Breathless starring Jack Davenport in 2013. Copyright: ITV.

The interior also substituted for the bustling ward of a 1961 hospital for an ITV six-part drama series called Breathless in 2013 and featured in the BBC’s The Interceptor (“a clichéd mess with appalling dialogue”, according to the Daily Mirror) in 2015.

The BBC series The Inceptor was filmed inside Keybridge House in 2013. Copyright: BBC.

Urban myths

As Keybridge House fell into disuse, rumours began to swirl. After all, even though there were lights on, nobody ever seemed go in or out of the front door. Was Keybridge House actually the real headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service or at the very least a satellite to MI6’s eye-catching ‘Babylon on Thames’ building (Terry Farrell and Partners, 1994) next to Vauxhall Bridge, the two linked by underground tunnels? There were reports of ‘unusual levels of microwave activity’. But although Keybridge House did house secure lines for the security services, there’s no evidence for any other link.

Urban exploration

In its dilapidated state, Keybridge House inevitably became a magnet to urban explorers. One group which visited early in 2016 took some amazing pictures, some of which are published here on 28dayslater.co.uk, a UK urban exploration forum.

Keybridge House as captured by urban explorers in 2016. Reproduced with permission.

Breeding peregrine falcons

Also enjoying the vantage point afforded by Keybridge House were a duo of peregrine falcons. From 2010 onwards this pair – who outside the breeding season hung around the Houses of Parliament– would make a nest at the top of the Keybridge House tower. Each June, the South Lambeth Road would be visited by ornithologists hoping for a view of the year’s chicks.

The largest falcon in the UK, peregrines catch other birds in flight by reaching speeds of over 200mph. Although no longer on the Endangered Species list, peregrine falcons enjoy legal protection in the UK under the Wildlife & Countryside Act 1981 making it a criminal offence to intentionally or recklessly kill, injure or remove one. Nests and eggs are also protected and the Act makes it an offence to take, damage or destroy the nest of a wild bird while it is in use or being built, or to take or destroy the eggs.

Peregrine falcons at Keybridge House in 2010. Copyright: Owen Llewellyn, flickr.

Mount Anvil’s plans for the new Keybridge development featured a custom nesting box at the top of the highest (36-storey) block, but even so, this would mean a four-year period during construction when no nesting site would be available to them on the site. A nest box had been installed on the Houses of Parliament, where the pair habitually spent their winters and indeed the pair chose to nest there on the Victoria Tower, sparking fears in 2018 that a planned £6 billion refurb of Westminster could be halted.

According to Stuart Harrington of the London Peregrine Partnership, the original nesting pair will by now have been replaced by their successors but the Houses of Parliament remains the core structure in their territory. Says Stuart: ‘Keybridge may still be an option again if anything happened to the nest box at Parliament, but the skyline in Vauxhall has changed quite a bit since 2015. I’m not sure any of the new buildings there now will be as appealing to peregrines as that old “eyesore” was.’

Sale to Mount Anvil

In May 2012, BT announced it was putting Keybridge House up for sale, appointing property advisors CBRE to manage the sale, and architects Allies & Morrison to design a new scheme for the site.

CBRE put the building on the market in June 2014. Estimates at the time put the likely price tag at between £50 million and £100 million. In September, it was reported that developer Mount Anvil had bought Keybridge House. According to BT’s 2015 annual report the building was sold for £93 million at a profit of £67 million.

In September 2014, Lambeth Council granted planning permission for the demolition of Keybridge House and the building of five new mostly-residential blocks up to 36 storeys high, a scale made possible by the site falling within a designated  ‘high density’ mixed-use zone in the Vauxhall, Nine Elms, Battersea Opportunity Area.

Demolishing Keybridge House

The contract to demolish Keybridge House was awarded to Chelmsford firm Micor. Founded in 1986, this well-established company had won a World Demolition Award in 2013 and had been shortlisted again in both 2014 and 2015. Demolition News described Micor as “widely respected among its peers for its ability to tackle challenging and complex demolition works”.

Micor set to work in August 2015. The process, as outlined in Mount Anvil’s Local Residents’ Newsletter in October 2015 involved using ‘specialist machines’ to clear the buildings one floor at a time starting from the top. ‘The machines will remove all external and internal walls, before part-removing the floor they are placed on. Once this work is complete, our cranes will lower the machines through the partly removed floor to the level below. Here they will remove what’s left of the floor above them, before moving though the same methodology again.’

The plan was to remove the podium building first, then the tower, removing 21,000 cubic metres of concrete and 1,200 tonnes of other waste in the process. The chimneys would be dismantled by drilling lifting holes into them before cutting them into sections which could then be lifted out of place by crane.

But within a few months, demolition came to a halt. Demolition News reported on 16 February 2016 that Micor had ceased trading and an administrator appointed. The reasons behind the failure were not given, but the timing speaks for itself.

A company called John F. Hunt took over the demolition project which ended up taking 18 months and costing £12 million. The project might have been faster but for the reappearance of the peregrine falcons which would nest at the top of the tower each year causing work above the ninth floor to halt for four months.

Keybridge House demolition, 14 July 2016. Photo by stevekeiretsu on flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.

Out of the rubble

Some of the rubble from Keybridge House was used by New York-born artist Rachael Champion in an installation called New Spring Gardens.

The artwork was commissioned by Nine Elms on the South Bank with the support of the Vauxhall One Business Improvement District and property developers Mount Anvil and Fabrica. It was exhibited at Arch 147 in Newport Street between 21 May and 12 June 2016 as part of the Nine Elms on the South Bank Chelsea Fringe Festival.

‘New Spring Gardens’ by Rachael Champion is made with rubble from Keybridge House. Photo: rachaelchampion.com.

Hales Gallery explains the concept thus:

Today the relatively flat landscape of the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens is interspersed with distinct rolling grass covered mounds. These mounds, which feel incongruous and artificial in their form, are made up of the remaining rubble from the demolished houses.

New Spring Gardens embraces this landscaping strategy though leaves the excess rubble laid bare, revealing a misnomer in our perception of the landscapes in our cities.  London is renowned for its abundance of green spaces, though our experience of this verdant epidermis is mediated through a calculated and manicured skin covering complex layers of materials, infrastructure, and history. The Nine Elms redevelopment along the Thames is a prime example of an urban environment in flux, adding a distinct new layer to London’s landscape. New Spring Gardens endeavours to reflect on the physicality of this reconstruction by reinterpreting the idea of a garden as an urban space in transition.

If you are hankering for a keepsake of Keybridge House and have 28×8 metres spare somewhere, the installation appears to be available for an unspecified amount.

Aftermath: water, water everywhere

Although nothing physical remains of Keybridge House on the site, there are watery echoes of this once proud edifice and its relation to the groundwater and floodwaters it was designed to defend against.

First there’s the public sculpture, ‘Hidden River’ by London artist Tom Price which sits in the gardens of the new development. As Tom Price explained in an Instagram post:

Cast in concrete with carved porcelain inlays, the sculpture measures 24m in length and took us about 2 years to fabricate. Hidden River is an homage to the ancient River Effra, which once flowed through this site to the River Thames, but was diverted underground in the 1800s. The sculpture imagines the river defiantly carving a passage through subterranean London, exposing the many rich layers of the city’s cultural and industrial past. Inlaid porcelain seams are a reference to centuries of ceramic production on this site – from Roman times to the establishment of the famous Lambeth Potteries in C16. Passing between the blocks the viewer is invited to follow the path of the river, imagining the water gradually shaping the fluid forms and cavities into London’s industrial bedrock.

In fact, the diverted river Effra avoids the site by some distance, running along Lawn Lane and turning sharply right along the South Lambeth Road away from Keybridge House.

Although he doesn’t mention it, Price’s choice of materials also alludes to the massive amounts of concrete used to construct Keybridge House.

The public artwork ‘Hidden River’ by Tom Price sits in the grounds of what is now called Exchange Gardens. Photograph: Andrew Rogers

Price’s watery theme turned out to be as much a prophecy as a metaphor. In the spring of 2021, ‘Hidden River’ and much besides had to be dug up as part of a very protracted efforts to solve persistent flooding in the basements. Was this the spirit of Keybridge House playing one final trick up its sleeve before giving up the ghost for good? Or is there more to come?

27 May 2021: Tom Price’s ‘Hidden River’ sculpture and much besides has been dug up in an effort to solve flooding in the basement of the new development. Photo: Andrew Rogers.

Post Script

Q: When is a brick not a brick? A: When it’s brick.

We will leave it to the amateur local historians of 2074 to debate the merits or otherwise of the buildings that have replaced Keybridge House. So let’s keep this dry for now:

Architectural model of the new development by Allied and Morrison.
  • There are seven buildings in the new Exchange Gardens ranging from four to 36 storeys.
  • These house 598 homes, a handful (10?) of which are classed as ‘affordable’.
  • There is also 94,000 sq ft of space for shops, cafes and offices.
  • The basement contains underground parking for the residents.
  • At 73 metres / 240 feet, the tallest building (Keybridge Lofts) is also home to the development’s concierge, business lounge, 15-metre pool, gym, sauna and spa. At the very top are two ‘Skylofts’ – penthouses with double height ceilings and wraparound terraces.
  • There are five retail units on the South Lambeth Road of which at the time of writing (May 2024) only one – Gail’s bakery – is let.
  • A new extension and playground for Wyvil Primary School.
  • The site also features a five-metre-high single-storey basement called Storybox which at the time of writing remains unlet. This 1.3-acre ‘adaptable subterranean environment’ was envisaged as a suitable base for ‘“’pod hotels, labs or gaming experiences’, according to a 2020 article in Building Design.
  • At May 2024, the asking price for a three-bedroom apartment in the tower is £2.3 million with annual service charges of around £8,000. A first-floor studio flat is available for £490,000 or on the third floor for £600,000.

Despite my pledge to keep things dry, I must finally get just one thing off my chest: Much is made by Mount Anvil and Allies and Morrison of the Keybridge Lofts being ‘Europe’s largest brick residential tower’. Lest there be any confusion, it is not built of bricks, it is clad with a coating of brick dust. There, I can rest now.

Sources and further reading

Books

  • My GPO Family by John Chenery, 2017
  • London High: A guide to the past, present and future of London’s skyscrapers, Herbert Wright
  • Lambeth Architecture 1965-99, Edmund Bird & Fiona Price
  • The Buildings of England – London 2: South, Sir Nikolaus Pevsner and Bridget Cherry  

Articles

Photographs

Online