2 Marsham Street

Home Office Building

General information
Status	Complete
Address	2 Marsham Street, SW1P 4DF
Town or city	London
Country	United Kingdom
Construction started	2003
Opened	2005
Cost	£311 million
Client	Home Office, Department for Communities and Local Government
Technical details
Floor count	7
Floor area	800,000 sq ft (74,000 m²)
Lifts/elevators	24
Design and construction
Architect	Farrells
Structural engineer	Pell Frischmann
Main contractor	Bouygues
Awards and prizes	RIBA Award for Architecture

2 Marsham Street is an office building on Marsham Street in the City of Westminster, London, and has been the headquarters of the Home Office, a department of the British Government, since March 2005. Before this date the Home Office was located at 50 Queen Anne's Gate.

The site was previously occupied by the Departments of Environment and Transport. The headquarters offices of both departments were located in Marsham Towers - three 20-floor concrete towers (North, Centre and South) joined together by 'podium' floors to level 3. The towers won an architectural award and boasted express lifts, marble entrances and escalators to the 3rd floor - very modern government offices for the early 1970s. Construction had started in the early 1960s but was finally completed in 1971 and became the office of the new Department of Environment created in October 1970 (DOE was created out of a merger between the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and the Ministry of Transport).

The towers were considered by some to be a blot on London’s landscape and were subsequently nicknamed "the three ugly sisters" and "the toast rack".Michael Heseltine, the Secretary of State for the Environment in the late 1970s and early 1980s, allegedly said that the building offered the best view of London – because one could not see the towers from his north-facing 16th floor North tower office. Chris Patten called the complex "a building that deeply depresses the spirit".

The last government staff occupied the building in the late 1990s. The building was declared unfit for future use and the towers were demolished in 2003 to make way for the new building into which the Home Office moved in 2005. Prior to the 'ugly sisters' epoch, from about 1818, the site housed the Chartered Gas Works of the Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company, as well as a laundry yard.

...
Wikipedia