Feature: A history of 215 Euston Road
10 September 2004. By William Schupbach, Iconographic Collections curator at the Wellcome Library.
The first buildings to cover the site of 183-215 Euston Road were terraces of Georgian houses, erected in 1812. They remained intact until 1910, when the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants, a trade union, replaced six of the houses in the middle with a new headquarters building. Although the union was absorbed into the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), the original name remained carved in stone on the Gower Place side of the building for a further 65 years. A coat of arms on the Euston Road balustrade proclaimed the name of the building as Unity House.
Next to go were the Georgian houses at the east end, when the Wellcome Building was constructed in 1931-32. A view west to east then provided a textbook sequence of styles, from the terrace of 12 Georgian houses through the heavy Edwardian union building to the more elegant modern Wellcome Building. Reading from east to west, however, one saw a sad tale of decay, with the dazzling white Wellcome palazzo on the left, the grimy Edwardian block in the middle and the Georgian centenarians on the right.
Naturally it was these last that next attracted attention. The houses were bought by the developer Rudolph Palumbo (father of the present Lord Palumbo), who in 1938 proposed a nine-storey office block designed for him by Gordon Jeeves, a successful commercial architect. The onset of war in 1939 put an end to speculative civilian construction projects. The aged buildings grew even more decrepit.
In 1941, the City headquarters of the Wellcome Foundation, the pharmaceutical company, were bombed, and the firm moved into the Wellcome Building, originally designed for Sir Henry Wellcome’s historical collections. The company acquired the derelict site next door but one, and asked Waterhouse and Ripley to design a purpose-built office block for the site. Drawings were published in 1944, but the Foundation was having a troubled time and it was not until 1947 that it applied for permission to build. Even though permission was given, the company did not proceed, and at some stage gave up and sold the site. For the second time, the corner site defeated attempts to build on it.
In 1953, a new name appeared on the scene: Euston Square Holdings, presumably a company formed to develop the site re-using Waterhouse and Ripley’s designs. It immediately razed what was left of the Georgian buildings. In 1954, the Wellcome Foundation’s building eventually got under way, under a different name.
The building was completed in 1956 and was called Babcock House, as the occupants were the British subsidiary of the engineering firm Babcock and Wilcox. They used the building as their London headquarters until 1970.
Babcock House remained empty until the mid-1970s when it was occupied by a tenant whose name was never written on the outside, but which was generally known to be MI5. In 1995, MI5 vacated the building. Much like its Georgian predecessors, Babcock House began to deteriorate and decay.
Meanwhile, the Edwardian NUR building between the Wellcome Building and MI5 had been replaced. The stone building had an image of integrity that the union was loath to lose, but the working space inside was poor. Demolition started in 1979 and the second Unity House was officially opened on 3 May 1983.
Back on the corner site, the jinx that had frustrated Palumbo and Waterhouse struck again. The freehold was acquired early in 1990 by David Thompson, a former Smithfield meat trader turned property developer. In 1996, his company proposed to demolish the building and build a tower-on-a-slab office block of 28 storeys, to be called Euston Square Plaza. Again, nothing came of the plans.
In 1999 the Wellcome Trust announced that it had acquired both the NUR building and Babcock House, and that Michael Hopkins and Partners had been appointed to design a single new building to cover both sites. With the building completed, one hopes the 215 jinx has finally been laid to rest.
William Schupbach is Curator of the Iconographic Collections in the Wellcome Library.