No 1 Poultry, EC2R
St Paul’s from the south west in 1896
No 1 Poultry is an office and retail building in London.

It is located at the junction of Poultry and Queen Victoria Street, adjacent to Bank junction, in the City of London financial district. The building was designed by James Stirling for a site which then was owned by developer Peter Palumbo, and first assembled by Palumbo’s father, Rudolph, in the 1960s.

Originally intended to be the site of a modernist office tower designed by Mies van der Rohe in the manner of the Seagram Building in New York City, that scheme was aborted following one of the great architectural and planning show-downs of the 1970s.

A new design was created, Stirling’s final design, in a postmodernist style with an outer shell of bands of rose-pink stone. The structure was built after his death and is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of the postmodernist style in London.

In 2016, following proposals to alter it, it received government recognition with a listing at grade II*, making it the youngest listed building in England.

return to article