No 1 Poultry

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.

The building was owned by Heinrich Feldman until he sold it to Perella Weinberg Partners for £110 million in 2014.

The present building at No 1 Poultry was completed in 1997, five years after architect Stirling's death and three years after construction began. It is a postmodern structure, with use of bold, perhaps unsubtle, forms and colours in a compact assembly. It is clad in pink and yellow limestone, fixed in stripes and blocks of colour whilst the interior atrium at the centre of the wedge-shaped site displays some of Stirling's characteristic acidulous colour play.

Like many notable postmodern buildings, the imagery is rich in references. For example, from the sharp apex of the site a keyhole shaped opening leads to a little-seen Scala Regia with a ramped floor, gold-leafed terminus and ancient Egyptian aura takes visitors into the heart of the building. Intended as site owner Palumbo's private entrance, this space is now little used: Palumbo sold the development before its completion. The turret above is sometimes likened to a submarine conning tower while the glazed two-sided clock is in concept and detail a direct quotation from the Fascist-era main post office in Naples, Italy. Completed nearly two decades after the first designs were published, its reception among architectural critics suffered from the fact that the heyday of postmodernism was already over. Amongst the readers of Time Out magazine, it was voted the fifth worst building in London. However, its distinct image means it is often photographed as a symbol of the new London.

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