All of these pictures are taken from the same spot in St Mary Axe in the City of London and show the diversity of the London skyline.
Lloyd’s insurance business dates back to 1860 and a coffee house in Tower Street where Edward Lloyd would meet with business men who had shipping connections. They would insure each others cargo and write their names under the ship owner’s slip. Hence the term ‘under-writers’.
The Gherkin and St Mary Axe.
The ‘Gherkin, or the Swiss RE building as it should be known, is a fantastic Norman Foster design. 41 floors high and costing £138 million to construct it contains 17 lifts and only 5 car parking spaces. I wonder who gets them. While the tower is wonderfully curved there is only one piece of curved glass in the entire building which is the piece that crowns it.
The ‘Gherkin, or the Swiss RE building as it should be known, is a fantastic Norman Foster design. 41 floors high and costing £138 million to construct it contains 17 lifts and only 5 car parking spaces. I wonder who gets them. While the tower is wonderfully curved there is only one piece of curved glass in the entire building which is the piece that crowns it.
The original St Mary’s Axe Church was demolished in 1561 but the current building has been able to survive both the Great Fire of London and the Blitz. The name derives from the possession of one of three axes that beheaded St Ursula and her eleven thousand handmaidens in Cologne at the hands of the Huns, supposedly, in 383.
