Buildings
Sir John Smith, who was Conservative M.P. for Cities of London and Westminster from 1965 to 1970, lived at no. 1. The campaigning journalist William Thomas Stead lived at No. 5 from 1904 until his death on board the Titanic in 1912. Another famous resident was Rab Butler, the Conservative Deputy Prime Minister.
No. 17 is Nobel House, built in 1928 for the newly formed Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). ICI leased it to the government in 1987, and it is currently headquarters for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Next door is Transport House which from 1928 to 1980 was the headquarters of the Labour Party - and also the offices of the TGWU until the 1990s. It is now the headquarters of the Local Government Association and is known as Local Government House.
No. 32 served as Conservative Central Office, the Conservative Party's headquarters between 1958 and 2003. It stood empty until 2007 when it was sold for £30.5m to Harcourt Developments who planned to redevelop it as flats before the 2008 credit crunch hit. It is now Europe House, the London base of the European Parliament and the European Commission.
Read more about this topic: Smith Square
Famous quotes containing the word buildings:
“The American who has been confined, in his own country, to the sight of buildings designed after foreign models, is surprised on entering York Minster or St. Peter’s at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also,—faint copies of an invisible archetype.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity’s language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity’s disappearance.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means—from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.”
—Margaret Halsey (b. 1910)