History
Prior to the site's previous redevelopment in the 1960s, it had been used as the head office of the Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company (P&O) for over a century. Since 1840, P&O had worked in the rent-free offices of Willcox & Anderson. However, business east of the Gulf of Suez increased in the late-1840s resulting in the company needing newer and larger offices. It was the P&O directors' obligation to provide new space. In November 1845, the King's Arms inn and hotel at 122 Leadenhall Street was put up for sale. The freehold was bought by P&O for £7,250, which then commissioned an architect, Beachcroft, to design a new building. The cost of the new building was estimated at £8,000. In March 1848, P&O moved into the new office.
In 1854, P&O unsuccessfully attempted to purchase the neighbouring building at 121 Leadenhall Street, however they were eventually able to take a lease from the charity which held it. They also bought leases of 80 years from St. Thomas's Hospital on the residential properties at Nos. 123, 124 and 125 Leadenhall Street which were demolished to create a new frontage at No. 122. The new building provided more office space, some of which was for rent, and a spacious new courtyard.
By the mid-1960s P&O needed to redevelop the site to provide increased office space again. At the same time, the Commercial Union Assurance Company was also planning a redevelopment on an adjacent site on the corner of St. Mary Axe. However, due to a number of issues affecting both sites, notably poor access to the Commercial Union site and the restricted width of the P&O site, it was not possible to obtain planning consents that would optimise the amount of floor space desired by either company. As a result, the two companies decided to participate in a joint development that would involve the reallocation of site boundaries and the creation of an open concourse area at the junction of Leadenhall Street and St. Mary Axe. Both companies would have frontages to the new concourse and would retain site areas equivalent to those enclosed by the original boundaries.
Read more about this topic: 122 Leadenhall Street
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow, mathematical present.”
—Hermann Hesse (1877–1962)
“It is true that this man was nothing but an elemental force in motion, directed and rendered more effective by extreme cunning and by a relentless tactical clairvoyance .... Hitler was history in its purest form.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)