Everything about The Marsham Towers totally explained
The
Marsham Towers were three towers situated on the corner of Marsham Street and Great Peter Street in
Westminster,
London. They served as the headquarters of the
Department of the Environment.
The redevelopment of the site was long planned. The site was originally a gas works and had first included two gas holders (built
1875), renovated in
World War 2 for use as bomb shelter 'citadels' - the North Rotunda and the South Rotunda. A new 'Steel-Framed Building' was also added in
1940-
41. The Rotundas were designed to survive the impact of a 500 lb bomb and had 12 foot thick concrete roofs. In
1943 the lowest level of the North Rotunda (codenamed
Anson) was kitted out as the reserve to the
Cabinet War Rooms. The previous reserve
Paddock in Dollis Hill was seen to be unsatisfactory and too far from
Whitehall.
By the early 1960s the increasing numbers of civil servants led to the commissioning of Eric Bedford (
1909 -
2001), Chief Architect for the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works, to design a headquarters building for three separate ministries. His design, published in
1963, placed three twenty-storey slab blocks parallel north to south on top of a three-storey podium slab raised on stilts. Each tower was 66 metres tall and had exposed concrete framing, being built in a new 'box-shell' system which mixed pre-cast concrete and on-site construction.
The towers were completed in
1971 and incorporated the Rotundas in the base. The Rotundas were used as a communications centre and a civil service sports club, amongst other things. By the time the towers were complete, the three separate ministries had merged into the Department of the Environment, and having separate towers proved inefficient. The bland frontage of the blocks, described in
Nikolaus Pevsner's architectural guides as "the very image of faceless bureaucracy", was much criticised and local people nicknamed them as "
the three ugly sisters".
Michael Heseltine announced on
February 6,
1992 that he proposed to knock the building down. In
1996 an architectural competition was held for a mixed-use replacement but didn't produce a clear outcome. Eventually it was decided to build a replacement for the
Home Office on the site and the towers were taken down in
2002-
03. The site is now occupied by Sir
Terry Farrell's new building at
2 Marsham Street which the Home Office first occupied in February
2005.
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