The Lloyd's building is the home of the insurance institution Lloyd's of London. It is located on the former site of East India House in Lime Street, in London's main financial district, the City of London. The building is a leading example of radical Bowellism architecture in which the services for the building, such as ducts and lifts, are located on the exterior to maximise space in the interior. Twenty-five years after completion in 1986, the building received Grade Ilisting in 2011; it was the youngest structure ever to obtain this status. It is said by Historic England to be "universally recognised as one of the key buildings of the modern epoch".
History
The first Lloyd's building had been built on this site in 1928. In 1958, due to expansion of the market, a new building was constructed across the road at 51 Lime Street. Lloyd's now occupied the Heysham Building and the Cooper Building. By the 1970s Lloyd's had again outgrown these two buildings and proposed to extend the Cooper Building. In 1978, the corporation ran an architectural competition which attracted designs from practices such as Foster Associates, Arup and I.M. Pei. Lloyd's commissioned Richard Rogers to redevelop the site, and the original 1928 building on the western corner of Lime and Leadenhall Streets was demolished to make way for the present one which was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 18 November 1986. The 1928 building's entrance at 12 Leadenhall Street was preserved and forms a rather incongruous attachment to the 1986 structure. Demolition of the 1958 building commenced in 2004 to make way for the 26-storey Willis Building.
Design
The current Lloyd's building was designed by the architect company Richard Rogers and Partners and built between 1978 and 1986. Bovis was the management contractor. Like the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the building was innovative in having its services such as staircases, lifts, ductwork, electrical power conduits and water pipes on the outside, leaving an uncluttered space inside. The 12 glass lifts were the first of their kind in the United Kingdom. Like the Pompidou Centre, the building was highly influenced by the work of Archigram in the 1950s and 1960s. The building consists of three main towers and three service towers around a central, rectangular space. Its core is the large Underwriting Room on the ground floor, which houses the Lutine Bell within the Rostrum. Also on the first floor is the loss book which for 300 years has had entries of significant losses entered by quill. The Underwriting Room is overlooked by galleries, forming a high atrium lit naturally through a huge barrel-vaulted glass roof. The first four galleries open onto the atrium space, and are connected by escalators through the middle of the structure. The higher floors are glassed in and can only be reached via the exterior lifts. The 11th floor houses the Committee Room, an 18th-century dining room designed for the 2nd Earl of Shelburne by Robert Adam in 1763; it was transferred piece by piece from the previous Lloyd's building across the road at 51 Lime Street. The Lloyd's building is to the roof, with 14 floors. On top of each service core stand the cleaning cranes, increasing the overall height to. Modular in plan, each floor can be altered by addition or removal of partitions and walls. In 2008 the Twentieth Century Society called for the building to be Grade I listed and in 2011 it was granted this status. The building was previously owned by Dublin-based real estate firm Shelbourne Development Group, who purchased it in 2004 from a German investment bank. In July 2013 it was sold to the Chinese company Ping An Insurance in a £260 million deal.
In popular culture
;Use in feature films and record album covers It is seen on the cover of British pop group Five Star's 1986 album Silk and Steel; Hundred Reasons' debut albumIdeas Above Our Station; and the 2001 reissue of British electronic musician Mike Paradinas' 1993 album Tango n' Vectif, under the alias μ-ziq. ;Use as a location in films
