No.1 Poultry

A speculative office building incorporating retail units, the Green Man public house, a public right of way (Bucklersbury Passage) and a rooftop restaurant and garden. Designed in 1985-88 by James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates for Peter Palumbo's City Acre Property Investment Trust Ltd, and built in 1994-98 by the practice, renamed Michael Wilford and Partners after Stirling's premature death in 1992.

Laurence Bain was the architect-in-charge. Ove Arup and Partners were the structural and mechanical engineers, John Laing Construction the main contractor. The rooftop landscape was designed by Arabella Lennox-Boyd, and the restaurant interior by Conran Design Partnership.

Structure and Materials

The structure was determined by the underlying geology and archaeology. The building has a reinforced concrete frame on granite foundations and is clad with alternating bands of rusticated buff and red sandstone—Australian Helidon and Wilderness Red from the Forest of Dean, Gloucestershire. Rosa Gallura granite is used for detail, cladding and paving. The atrium is lined with glazed blue tiles. In the principal public areas, fixtures and fittings including windows are in bronze. Elsewhere window frames are predominantly powder-coated aluminium, in places brightly coloured. The ground floor level of the atrium or courtyard is paved in York stone, defining the public realm.

Plan

No.1 Poultry occupies the wedge of land at the intersection of Queen Victoria Street and Poultry. Symmetrical in plan and section, it is laid out about a central longitudinal axis. The design is set out on a 1.5-metre grid which informs the rhythm and bay divisions of the external and inward-facing facades and internal plan. In plan it resembles a wedge pierced with an open cylindrical volume into which is inserted a triangular form.

The building is of six storeys plus two basement floors. The ground floor and lower ground floor concourse levels incorporate retail units, including covered shopping, an entrance to Bank underground station and a public right of way, namely Bucklersbury Passage. Floors 1-5 are occupied by offices, with a publicly accessible rooftop restaurant and garden above. On the south-west corner is a pub opening from both the street and the concourse. Cutting through the building, Bucklersbury Passage—expressed as a courtyard with an open rotunda above and below—replaces the historic route of Bucklersbury.

Design and Context

The design is characteristic of Stirling's work in its exploration of space and movement through interlocking geometrical forms, and in terms of motifs and materials, as first realised at the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart. The generosity of the public realm is wholly exceptional for a speculative scheme, and the interlocking geometry and use of colour have a powerful intensity that derive from the tight constraints of the site.

The project was conceived, revised and executed by the same practice, and in principle executed as stipulated to Stirling's agreed design, as set out in his Proof of Evidence to the Inquiry. Materials were sourced and technical detail finalised after his death, incorporating later revisions and amendments imposed as the building was under construction, for example to allow emergency access.

Exterior

The long elevations are symmetrical in three main bays with atypical bays at the western end. Each elevation has a colonnaded base rising through two storeys, either side of a projecting monumental opening with sloping sides. Above, the middle and top sections are articulated in a pattern of alternating segmental stone bays—into which are set two tiers of windows—and V-shaped glass bays. The bay rhythm and parapet height acknowledge the surrounding buildings. The colonnades are separated from the upper floors by a giant bull-nosed stringcourse of grey granite. Behind the colonnades are bronze, segmental glazed shopfronts and at first floor level windows which are offset from the colonnade. The Poultry elevation incorporates a terracotta frieze of royal progresses by Joseph Kremer, salvaged from the demolished 12-13 Poultry by Frederick Chancellor. Flanking the Poultry entrance, the address—1 Poultry—is set into the stone in bronze lettering.

The apex of the building is distinguished by a prominent tower. This rises from the blind flanking walls which are carried forward at ground floor level to form a large, round-headed entrance with a revolving door. Above this is an acutely angled V-shaped window—echoing those on the side elevations—and the cylindrical tower itself which incorporates a window in the form of a clock and, higher up, the cantilevered platforms of the viewing turret. Behind, the flanking walling terminates in a bold prow-like cornice. The tower has been compared with that of the Mappin and Webb building (J and J Belcher, 1870-71) which it replaced but may also allude to Roman rostral columns and a 1974 scheme for a Tuscan tower house by Stirling's former assistant, Léon Krier. The clock window, the design completed after Stirling's death, is said to be based on Stirling's own watch.

Internal Spaces

The public thoroughfare through the side entrances—the ancient right of way of Bucklersbury Passage—is threaded through a centrally placed open court, articulated on the street elevation by the curved form of the drum at the top. Into this volume is inserted a triangle of offices, the switch indicated by the diagrid ceiling of the covered way, the superimposition of geometries (a favourite Stirling device), and wall treatment echoing the alternating bays of the exterior. At street level a central triangular gallery within the compass of the structural piers overlooks the lower level concourse and, as on the upper floors, has a bronze handrail. In each quadrant of the ground floor atrium are shop windows of different heights, the main entrance to the office floors to the west (finalised after Stirling's death), and access to the lower concourse to the east. The clock from the Mappin and Webb building is mounted above the entrance.

The lower concourse, also circular on plan, was designed to accommodate retail outlets, with a restaurant added after completion. At first floor office level the stone-clad wall of the atrium is blind while the second floor has deepset small square lights, as if echoing a classically informed basement storey. The triangular inserts of the projecting upper office floors are clad in blue glazed tiles into which deepset windows with pink, yellow and blue reveals are set, the whole resembling an intimate domestic street or court, as if the tight City street plan is represented in ascending layers. Paving, as elsewhere, is of granite slabs.

The approach from the apex into the central drum creates a dramatic and fluid relationship of internal and external spaces, exceptional in a post-modernist commercial building, that conjures up the multi-facetted historic fabric of the City—a recurring theme, of cities within cities, in Stirling's later work. Rising from the principal entrance at the apex of the building to the first floor is a dramatic, monumental stair of inclined granite steps, lined within banded masonry walls and beneath a vaulted roof. At upper levels panels appear to pivot, to accommodate small windows which let in light and provide glimpses from the office floor.

From the main entrance within the central court, glass-sided lifts rise to roof level where they emerge beneath a steel canopy (the entrance sequence and lifts all detailed after Stirling's death), which oversails the atrium and can be viewed from the terrace. The rooftop restaurant, named by Terence Conran the Coq d'Argent (Silver Cockerel)—punning on the name of the building and its architect—has bronze doors, fixtures and fittings. The interior, designed by C D Architects (Conran Design) in 1997, appears to have been partly refitted but is essentially as built.

The garden, designed by Arabella Lennox-Boyd, reflects the geometrical form of the building. An open loggia within the banded sandstone-lined drum is formed of a sturdy oak pergola on granite plinths, with diagonally set paving that echoes the diagrid, and is backed by luxuriant informal planting. A simple opening in the drum wall opens onto a lawn above the prow of the building (astro-turfed in 2015) flanked by formal rows of box hedging and spherical forms and leads to an enclosed circular platform and viewing turret at the apex—a rare instance of a post-modern garden associated with its parent building.

Western Elevation and Public House

The asymmetrical south-western bay on Queen Victoria Street containing the Green Man pub is treated in the manner of the main elevations and turns abruptly to the largely unseen Sise Lane elevation, which is in a simpler palette of materials, of stucco walls and geometrical forms. The west-facing pub window is supported on a striking yellow conical shaft, the latter a reference to Stirling's earlier work. Above, deepset windows picked out in yellow in pronounced rectangular masonry architraves contrast with the adjacent section where bands of strip glazing, in an almost moderne spirit, are picked out in blue, with yellow portholes above.

Interior

Granite-lined lift lobbies with sloping sides and deepset lift openings with bright coloured reveals echo the external openings in their form and use of colour. Ceilings which echo the diagrid are apparent in the office floors. The offices and retail units were intended to be flexibly fitted out and have been refitted. On the first floor are squinch-like internal openings of the windows lighting the monumental stair. On the second office floor the rear openings of the atrium windows are deeper than on the external face. Aside from a perimeter counter below and adjacent to the window, the Green Man pub has also been refitted.

Office partitions, fixtures and fittings, retail unit and concourse restaurant interiors, fixtures and fittings, the bar and counter in the Green Man pub, plant and services, and basement storage and parking facilities are not of special interest. Pursuant to section 1 (5A) of the Planning (Listed Buildings and Conservation Areas) Act 1990 it is declared that these aforementioned features are not of special architectural or historic interest.