233, High Holborn

No. 233 High Holborn is an office block built in 1930, designed by Frederick Etchells and Herbert A Welch for the advertising agency WS Crawford Ltd, who remodeled an existing building. It features a steel frame construction with brick panel infilling and an external finish of roughcast cement, highlighted by a polished black marble ground floor frontage. The building has six bays, including a splayed corner bay, and double entrance doors made of plain stainless steel with a grille above. Continuous strip windows, framed and mullioned in stainless steel, are glazed with prismatic glass and alternate with bands of roughcast.

Inside, contemporary internal decor and fittings were present in 1973, but very little remains now. Historically, this office block is noted as a pioneering work of the Modern Movement in England and is considered one of the first office blocks in England influenced by the International style. Frederick Etchells began his career as a Vorticist painter in Paris before World War I, shifted to architecture in the 1920s, and was a founding member of the Twentieth Century Group in 1930. In 1927, he translated Le Corbusier's "Vers une Architecture" into English and later focused on restoring churches in Berkshire.