page_title: No 1 Poultry
section_title: Construction
hierarchical_section_title: No 1 Poultry / Construction
caption_attribution_description: English: The Mappin &amp; Webb building, London (as was). Designed by John Belcher in 1870, this architectural gem was built to house the offices of the royal silversmiths. Its shape and proportions suited perfectly the crowded space available, and it quickly became a great favourite with visitors approaching the city from the east. In 1968, developers began to make other plans for this site, involving demolition and rebuilding. A massive campaign fought off these plans until 1994 when its replacement - No. 1 Poultry - was erected. See1229381
context_page_description: No 1 Poultry is an office and retail building in London. It is located at the junction of Poultry and Queen Victoria Street, adjacent to Bank junction, in the City of London financial district. The building was designed by James Stirling for a site which then was owned by developer Peter Palumbo, and first assembled by Palumbo's father, Rudolph, in the 1960s. It was originally intended to be the site of a modernist office tower designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the manner of the Seagram Building in New York City, but that scheme was aborted following one of the great architectural and planning show-downs of the 1970s. A new design was created, Stirling's final design, in a postmodernist style with an outer shell of bands of rose-pink stone. The structure was built after his death and is considered one of the greatest masterpieces of the postmodernist style in London. In 2016, following proposals to alter it, it received government recognition with a listing at grade II*, making it the youngest listed building in England.
  The building was owned by Heinrich Feldman until he sold it to Perella Weinberg Partners for £110 million in 2014.
context_section_description: The construction of No 1 Poultry required the fiercely fought and highly publicised demolition of a 19th-century neo-gothic listed building on the apex of the site, then occupied by crown jewellers Mappin and Webb. It had been designed by John Belcher in 1870.
  An office building and public square by Mies van der Rohe was commissioned for the site in 1969, to be known as Mansion House Square. Van der Rohe's plans were criticised as "yet another giant glass stump, better suited to downtown Chicago than the City of London" by Prince Charles in his 1984 "carbuncle" speech to RIBA, and the plans were eventually scrapped.
  While construction was underway, a major archaeological dig was undertaken by the Museum of London Archaeology Service, directed by Peter Rowsome. This excavation made several significant discoveries, including a wooden drain along the main Roman road. Using dendrochronology, this was dated to the year AD 47, suggesting this may be the date of the founding of Roman Londinium.
  Construction was completed in 1997.
caption: The Mappin & Webb building in 1993, which was demolished to make way for No 1 Poultry
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