Travis Elborough: The relaunch of Space House

Sister building to the better known Centre Point, Space House in Covent Garden opened in 1968 – the same year Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was packing them in at the Casino Cinerama and also, more pointedly, when the partial collapse of the Ronan Point tower block in Canning Town, following a gas explosion, put something of a crimper on public attitudes to skyscrapers and modernist buildings.

Formerly a thrusting symbol of progress, such brutalist architecture acquired a distinctly dystopian reputation from then on – one only reinforced by Kubrick’s decision to film part of his next movie, A Clockwork Orange, on the Thamesmead estate on Erith Marshes. The rotting block and the dank underpass became tabloid bywords for urban decay and social unrest, the words “concrete” and “monstrosity” forever teamed in red top standfirsts.

But perceptions of Space House today demonstrate how much attitudes have changed in recent years towards once widely-derided 1960s and 1970s architecture. On Wednesday evening, the same unseasonably warm night that the Stirling Prize for architecture was awarded to the Elizabeth line, I found myself there, at a reception celebrating its comprehensive – and expensive, at around £110 million – refurbishment by its current owners, Seaforth Land.

Both Space House and its egg box-shaped counterpart were designed by the London architectural firm of Richard Seifert and Partners, with lead partner George Marsh doing most of the heavy lifting. They were commissioned as commercial offices by the secretive and speculative property developer Harry Hyams.

Famously dubbed “the daddy of all developers”, Hyams rode London’s post-war building boom to become a millionaire at the age of 30. He had a weakness for space-race names – Apollo House and Lunar House, both in Croydon, were among his other properties – and is widely held to have supplied Space House with its apt, intergalactic moniker.

Space House originated as one of two separate “houses” going under that name, joined by a two-storey bridging section. The one seen from Kingsway, the road artery that protects most of legal Holborn and literary Bloomsbury from the gaudy excesses of the West End proper, is a slightly underwhelming eight-storey slab.

But turn the corner into Kemble Street and, hedged between the porridge-coloured mansion blocks of Peabody’s late-Victorian Wild Street estate and the bland, beige City Lit campus on Keeley Street, stands what was always the really spacey bit of Space House – its tower.

A circular rocket ship of a building on raised pilotis at One Kemble Street, with a polished, white concrete geometric patterned facade faintly reminiscent of a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, it looks like something out of Thunderbirds. Nearly 60 years on, it exudes a sort of raygun futurism that somehow still appears modern and, if anything, more unabashedly so than some of the computer-generated towers of today.

On the day of the reception, a vintage Aston Martin was parked outside, as if the Sean Connery-era James Bond, on the trail of SPECTRE agents, had just raced into town. This seemed fitting. When Space House was built, plans to plough an eight-lane super freeway, known as the Ringway or Motorway Box, through swathes of London had been drawn up.

The then transport minister Barbara Castle, although a non-driver, spoke enthusiastically about democratising car ownership. Accordingly, Space House was fitted with that essential of facility for Cold War spies exchanging enemy agents: an underground car park.

In the new scheme, this has been converted into a vast docking station for bicycles. Meanwhile, an as yet unfinished, restaurant at street level has been christened The Filling Station in ironic honour of the area’s former function – serving petrolheads. (Another Seifert building of this age was, by the way, the Esso Motor Hotel at Wembley).

Another significant change made to the building is the addition of two new storeys, and its crowning glory is now an encircling roof terrace on the 17th floor, offering 360 degree views of London.

In the main lobby, I spied a copy of a book of Andy Warhol’s polaroids artfully placed on a mid-20th century-style table. Given its tasteful period decor throughout – onyx marble, deep-brown Scandinavian woods, the lot – you could almost be forgiven for thinking you’d stepped into a late series episode of Mad Men.

A vinyl record player of the sort hi-fi buffs go into raptures about enjoys pride of place at the front desk, mounted on a specially commissioned block of reddish-brown resin. On this occasion, it was spinning Curtis Mayfield’s soundtrack to the movie Superfly.

Back in the day, Centre Point and Space House both struggled to find tenants. Hyams stood accused of deliberately keeping the former empty, as the growth in its capital value was greater than its potential rental income. It was a claim he vigorously denied, along with threats of legal action, right up until his death in 2015 at the age 87.

Space House was not let until 1975, when it became home to the Civil Aviation Authority, which only vacated it in 2019. At a time when another classic 1960s landmark, the Post Office Tower, is set to be turned into a luxury hotel and the more general trend, as with Centre Point, is conversion into unaffordable homes for overseas investors, there it something pleasingly retro about Seaforth’s ambitions to keep Space House as a commercial office block.

Travis Elborough is a writer and cultural commentator. Support OnLondon.co.uk and its freelancers for just £5 a month or £50 a year and get things for your money that other people don’t. Details HERE.