In his 2012 book A New Kind of Bleak, the critic Owen Hatherley called it “monstrous, compelling” and utterly messed-up. Back in the 1980s, a then Prince Charles suggested it had been inspired by a North Sea oil rig. But none of this stopped it from becoming, in 2011, the youngest ever building to be given Grade I-listed status in the UK.
And now, as part of its 40th anniversary celebrations, the Lloyd’s building will open to the public for the first time since 2014 for one day only during London’s Open House festival. The iconic building in the heart of the financial district was designed by architect Richard Rogers to house the global insurance marketplace. Its futuristic facade has been a celebrated part of the City of London skyline since it opened in 1986, but the interior is rarely seen by the public.
Visitor galleries with a view of the trading floor have long been shut for security reasons. Open House festival is organised by the charity Open City, which aims to make architecture more accessible by inviting government offices, private properties and heritage buildings to let the public in. Free tickets for the Lloyd’s building are released tomorrow for the one day the building is open, on 19 September.
The tour will include the underwriting room and the Adam Room as well as examining how the building was designed. This late modernist style evolved in the 1970s and celebrates industrial engineering and prefabricated materials. Lloyd’s is famous for its exposed concrete frame and the six external steel towers that house its staircases, lifts, pipes and ducts.
The building’s 12 glass lifts were the first of their kind in the UK, and each tower is permanently topped with steel cranes - partly for maintenance but also to make the building look like a gothic cathedral. I remember then thinking it was huge.” With all the infrastructure removed from the inside, the Lloyd’s building has capacity for a double-height space for the trading floor and a galleried atrium that reaches to the steel and glass barrel-vaulted roof, 14 floors above. Historian Reyner Banham compared the atrium to the Parthenon when he presented Rogers with the Royal Institute of British Architects’ gold medal in 1985.
The building also includes historical artefacts from Lloyd’s of London’s 338-year history. The Adam Room, originally designed in 1763 for Bowood House in Wiltshire by neoclassical architect Robert Adam, was sliced into 1,500 pieces in 1958 and moved to Lloyd’s HQ. The old library from Lloyds’ former home in the Cooper building on Leadenhall Street – designed by Sir Edwin Cooper in 1928 – was similarly salvaged.
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