Britannic House designed by Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens. On the north-west side of Finsbury Circus, London EC2, with front on the road leading into the Circus from the west and on Moorgate. Designed by Lutyens for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which later became British Petroleum. One of Sir Francis Derment Wood's statues of Britannia appears at the corner of the of the building in the photograph at left. The right photograph shows the position of Britannia and the Indian Water Carrier. [Click on these photographs and those below for larger images.]
In his magisterial — and massive — history of architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Henry-Russell Hitchcock points out that “it fell to Lutyens's lot to build some of the biggest business structures erected anywhere outside America” (404) in the first three decades of the twentieth century. “Lutyens's most successful big business building is doubtless Britannic House of 1924-7. This profits from the site between Finsbury Circus and Moorgate Street, the curve of the circus giving to the eastern front a certain major Baroque drama that is echoed in the versatile play with seventeenth-eighteenth-century in the detailing” (408).
Derwent Wood's Persian Scarf Dancer appears near the left edge of the photograph and his Woman with Baby (or Spring) on the opposite side. Eric Raymond Broadbent's keystone sculptures appear in the center.
Another view of the façade of Britannic House.
Text and photographs by Robert Freidus. Formatting and perspective correction by George P. Landow. [You may use these images without prior permission for any scholarly or educational purpose as long as you (1) credit the photographer and (2) link your document to this URL in a web document or cite the Victorian Web in a print one.]
References
Hitchcock, Henry-Russell. Architecture: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. The Pelican History of Art. 2nd ed. Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin, 1963.
Ward-Jackson, Philip. Public Sculpture of the City of London. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2003.
.Last modified 22 July 2011