Portcullis House

Portcullis House (PCH) is an office building in Westminster, London, UK, that was commissioned in 1992 and opened in 2001 to provide offices for 213 Members of Parliament and their staff. Part of the Parliamentary Estate, the building augments limited space in the Palace of Westminster and surroundings.

History and use

The architects, Michael Hopkins and Partners, published their design in 1993 and the existing buildings on the site were demolished in 1994. At the same time, London Underground was building the Jubilee Line Extension, including a new interchange station at Westminster tube station which occupies the same area; the two were thus designed and built as a single unit. Construction began with works to the existing District line station at sub-basement level. The track had to be lowered slightly and underpinned to allow the extensive excavation to the Jubilee line many feet below. The building above ground began to rise in 1998 and opened in 2001. It is located at the corner of Bridge Street and Victoria Embankment, overlooking the River Thames.

Castle Gate

Castle Gate or Castlegate may refer to:

Town or part of a town

Shopping centre

Street

Other

Norman Shaw Buildings

The Norman Shaw Buildings (formerly known as New Scotland Yard) are a pair of buildings in Westminster, London. Built by renowned architect Richard Norman Shaw between 1887 and 1906, they were originally the location of New Scotland Yard (the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police) until 1967, but from 1979 have been used as Parliamentary offices and have been named Norman Shaw North and South Buildings, augmenting limited space in the Palace of Westminster.

Architecture

The buildings are in banded red brick and white portland stone on a granite base in the Victorian Romanesque style, and are located upon Victoria Embankment next-door to Portcullis House.

The North Building is Grade I listed. It was designed in 1887 as the replacement central offices of the Metropolitan Police, Shaw being the personal choice of the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews. It was built on land reclaimed from the River Thames by the building of the Victoria Embankment and which was previously allocated to a new opera house which was already partly built. The cost was around £120,000. In 1888, during the construction of New Scotland Yard, workers discovered the dismembered torso of a female; the case, known as the "Whitehall Mystery", has never been solved. Opened in 1890, the building was soon found inadequate for the growing police force and an extension was required.

Richard Norman Shaw

Richard Norman Shaw RA (7 May 1831 – 17 November 1912) was a British architect who worked from the 1870s to the 1900s, known for his country houses and for commercial buildings.

Life

Shaw was born in Edinburgh, and trained in the London office of William Burn with George Edmund Street and attended the Royal Academy classes, receiving a thorough grounding in classicism, and met William Eden Nesfield, with whom he was briefly in partnership. In 1854–1856 he travelled with a Royal Academy scholarship, collecting sketches that were published as Architectural Sketches from the Continent, 1858.

In 1863, after sixteen years of training, he opened a practice for a short time with Nesfield. In 1872, Shaw was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy.

He worked, among others, for the artists John Callcott Horsley and George Henry Boughton, and the industrialist Lord Armstrong. He designed large houses such as Cragside and Grim's Dyke, as well as a series of commercial buildings in a wide range of styles.

Big Ben

Big Ben is the nickname for the Great Bell of the clock at the north end of the Palace of Westminster in London, and often extended to refer to the clock and the clock tower. The tower is officially known as Elizabeth Tower, renamed to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Elizabeth II in 2012; previously it was known simply as the Clock Tower. The tower holds the second largest four-faced chiming clock in the world (after Minneapolis City Hall). The tower was completed in 1858 and had its 150th anniversary on 31 May 2009, during which celebratory events took place. The tower has become one of the most prominent symbols of the United Kingdom and is often in the establishing shot of films set in London.

Elizabeth Tower

Elizabeth Tower (previously called the Clock Tower or St. Stephen's Tower), more popularly known as Big Ben, was raised as a part of Charles Barry's design for a new palace, after the old Palace of Westminster was largely destroyed by fire on the night of 16 October 1834. The new Parliament was built in a Neo-gothic style. Although Barry was the chief architect of the Palace, he turned to Augustus Pugin for the design of the clock tower, which resembles earlier Pugin designs, including one for Scarisbrick Hall. The design for the tower was Pugin's last design before his final descent into madness and death, and Pugin himself wrote, at the time of Barry's last visit to him to collect the drawings: "I never worked so hard in my life for Mr Barry for tomorrow I render all the designs for finishing his bell tower & it is beautiful." The tower is designed in Pugin's celebrated Gothic Revival style, and is 315 feet (96.0 m) high.