No 1 Poultry

James Stirling’s office building on the corner at Bank is striped in pink and yellow stone and has a tower that juts forward like the prow of a ship. Its construction was preceded by a long battle over conservation. It became one of the first postmodern buildings to be listed in England.

The developer Peter Palumbo planned for a long time to demolish a group of Victorian buildings at the junction of Poultry and Queen Victoria Street. He first wanted to build a tower by Mies van der Rohe, but after long protests and Prince Charles’s criticism it was not approved. Instead James Stirling was engaged. He died in 1992, and the building was completed by his partner Michael Wilford in 1997.

The building has a triangular plan with a point facing the junction, where a tower juts forward. The façades are clad in striped stone in pink and yellow. A passage runs through the building with a round court that opens upwards. On the roof is a garden with a restaurant and a view over the City. The forms are classically inspired but playful, with quotations from both Egyptian and modernist architecture.

In 2016 No 1 Poultry became one of the youngest buildings in England to be listed. It has been criticised for replacing a group of Victorian buildings worth preserving, and the dispute became an important case in the British conservation debate. The building is one of the most debated works of postmodernism in London.

• Postmodernism
• James Stirling