MI6's riverside headquarters is Britain's least secret secret building
Britain's foreign intelligence service works from a stepped, glass-clad fortress on the Thames at Vauxhall that nobody could miss. Its previous home was hardly better hidden; one newspaper called it London's worst-kept secret, known to every taxi driver, tour guide and KGB agent.
That earlier base, Century House in Lambeth, was a 22-storey glass tower with a petrol station at its foot, and a 1985 government audit judged it hopelessly insecure. With a short lease and costly upgrades looming, the service needed somewhere new. In 1988 Margaret Thatcher approved buying a speculative office scheme designed by architect Terry Farrell, and the final cost came to about 135 million pounds, or 152.6 million with the service's special requirements.
Farrell drew on 1930s industrial landmarks like Battersea Power Station and on Mayan and Aztec temples. The layered structure has 60 separate roof areas and uses 25 kinds of glass, with triple-glazed windows, two moats and much of the building below street level. Staff get a gym, a squash court and a restaurant. A tunnel to Whitehall under the Thames is rumoured but unconfirmed. Before construction, excavations uncovered 17th-century glass kilns on a site that once held the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens.
Queen Elizabeth II opened it on 14 July 1994. In September 2000 an anti-tank rocket fired from a nearby park struck an eighth-floor window but did only superficial damage. Since 2007, simply trespassing on the site has been a specific criminal offence.
Critics split sharply. The Guardian's Deyan Sudjic saw it as an epitaph for 1980s architecture that could pass for a Mayan temple or clanking art deco machinery, while others found it too Gotham City. The films embraced it: it first appeared in the Bond film GoldenEye in 1995 and was attacked on screen several times, and MI6 staff at a special premiere of Skyfall cheered when their own headquarters exploded.
Source: SIS Building
