I didn't like it when it was first built but it's grown on me in recent years.
The inside-out nature of it is better looking than the Pompidou Centre, also by Rogers and also inside-out, which I still dislike.

*Edit ...Just seen Mintball's post ... makes this one a little redundant

On modernity and out of London, I do like what they've done in Liverpool around the docks, keeping the essence of the historic dock buildings, but also adding some really interesting new ones.

On modernity and out of London, I do like what they've done in Liverpool around the docks, keeping the essence of the historic dock buildings, but also adding some really interesting new ones.

You might like the Carreras Building in Hampstead Rd.
I'd never heard of it until I was poking around the Mornington Crescent area (*) and suddenly came across this huge painted thing with Egyptian columns up the front.


(*) Having originally gone to the area to see Sir John Soane's tomb (from which Giles Gilbert Scott is supposed to have got his idea for the shape of the iconic red phone box), Hardy's tree (just Google it, fascinating story about Thomas Hardy and the railway to St Pancras) and the tomb of Mary Wollstonecroft ... all of which are in the pleasant churchyard of Old St Pancras Church, well worth an hour of one's time and only a short walk from St Pancras station, where the hotel was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott, the grandfather of the aforementioned Giles.

Just a shame that they've blocked the Liver Building from your viewpoint

The study of architecture is always fascinating and on the rare occasions that I get dragged by the females into Leeds then I stand around outside various shops waiting for them to do whatever the hell it is that women do in their womens shops, and I stare at the upper floors of whatever street I am stood in, up above the corporate branding vandalism of most of our high streets are the story of the high street and on main thoroughfares like Briggate in Leeds you get the full history of the city and an idea of how affluent some of the Victorian and Edwardian developers were - why else would you decorate the outside of your building with terracotta trimmings that serve no other purpose but to broadcast tot he world that YOU, the person who owns this retail outlet, are VERY, VERY wealthy and so deserving of the public confidence - something that you never ever see these days - when was the last time that you looked at a new B&Q warehouse and thought, "they must be worthy of our commercial trust, I mean, look at the money they've spent on that anodised orange cladding".

There's also a story behind the development of Leeds as a legal and financial centre in the 1970s and 80s over and above its neighbour in Bradford (which arguably has some much nicer remaining old buildings, yes really), from the awful 1960s functional but very ugly office buildings (fortunately not as all-pervasive as Bradfords centre was), through the 70s and 80s when someone at the council decided that plain old concrete was horrible and that brickwork should be seen once again in the city, preferably with contrasting brick features, and a proper pitched and tiled roof too - so much so did they buy into this concept that it became known as "The Leeds Design" and after a decade or so someone shouted "STOP" because it was becoming boring again

You can't win sometimes with architecture, the real answer is to have a good mix.

I rather like the compositions it creates with those diagonals, and then the Liver Building rising behind.

I used to be a London Bus driver, my route was the 24, i drove past it 8 times a day, 5 times a week for 2 years

I, like you, do that "upward looking" thing in Leeds and you see stuff like "Thornton and Co, India Rubber Manufacturers" above a shop front just a bit further up Briggate from M&S, very rewarding sometimes.
I heartily recommend buying/borrowing a copy of the latest version Of Pevsner's Architectural Guide to Leeds (as updated by Susan Wrathmell) ... it has short walks in the City Centre in it and I guarantee it will point out stuff that the lifelong Loiner never knew.


Aha, a Burmantofts-faced building? (e.g. Atlas House which houses the Allied Irish Bank in King Street, faced in "Marmo" ... or e.g. The interior of the cafe in the City Library, a great place to leaf through that Pevsner ... fantastic).

Amazing.
Is that the one from Victoria?

Did you like it?
The building, not the bus.

It goes through Victoria but not from it.

Yes, enough to actually look it up on the net

I worked in it for a short stint.