Broadcasting House

A pair of attached houses, now offices, was built in 1852 by JC Lee. The facades are limestone ashlar with lateral stacks and a concrete tile hipped roof. The houses have a double-depth plan and are built in a Neoclassical style, with three storeys and a basement. They feature a symmetrical front with projecting one-window wings, large Roman Doric porticos, and a banded ground floor. Between the wings and the party wall are Ionic pilasters, a frieze, a dentil cornice, and a parapet. The doorways have architraves, overlights, and double three-panel doors; the right-hand doorway is blocked. The windows consist of plate-glass ground-floor sashes, French windows to the middle first floor, and 6/6-pane sashes above. A first-floor tented balcony extends across the middle, supported by stone brackets and wrought-iron railings in oval panels. A late 19th-century, single-storey block is attached to the left-hand side, featuring banding, two windows, and a moulded parapet coping.

The interior includes entrance halls with dogleg stairs, cast-iron balusters and curtail, modillion cornices, and six-panel doors. Numbers 21 and 23 are linked into a single office building with numbers 21-33.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) moved into the property in 1934, originally providing West of England services. The studios expanded rapidly during the Second World War with the relocation of BBC departments from London, and the BBC’s Natural History Unit was established here. The BBC was formed in 1922 and became a public corporation in 1927. By 1939, BBC programming was listened to in approximately 75% of British households. The BBC began broadcasting high-definition television in 1936, and by 2022, its services were used by an average of five million adults every minute.