Picked by Alan Penn
‘I remember this building being built. It was the first time that a truly new piece of architecture had made its way into the heart of the City, which at the time was pretty fuddy-duddy. Richard Rogers, the architect, famously took the guts out of the building, the stairs, services and toilet blocks, and placed these around the edges of a rectangular block. Then he gave it a central atrium with grand, theatrical escalators linking the floors. It is a simple and thoroughly detailed building that respects its urban setting while challenging almost every preconception we might hold about buildings for seventeenth-century financial institutions.’
Nearest station Monument tube
