Building and History
From 1839 until 1913, ICE occupied numbers 24-26 Great George Street. In the mid-1880s the government proposed re-development of the area around Great George Street to provide more office space for government departments. This meant the demolition of ICE's first location and led ICE to move its headquarters across the road to numbers 1-7.
One Great George Street was built for the ICE between 1910 and 1913 and was the result of an architectural competition won by James Miller, RSA (1860-1947). This elegant and historical building has been described as a "monumental neo-classical design" and a "modern rendering of the late Renaissance". The exterior, foyer and staircase are made of Portland stone and many of the rooms are ornately decorated with French walnut and oak panelling, carved plaster ceilings and elaborate crystal chandeliers.
Between 1987 and 1991 the venue was modernised, with a theatre and another three rooms added to the lower ground floor, and a suite of smaller meeting rooms and a business centre in the basement level.
There are 19 rooms of varying size and style available for hire. Each room has been named after notable civil engineers, and the venue has paintings of them.
Read more about this topic: One Great George Street
Famous quotes containing the words building and/or history:
“There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)