Century House, London
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Century House, London is a 22-storey building located at 100 Westminster Bridge Road in
London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...
. The building was designed by P. M. Devereux and constructed between 1959 and 1964. It became the home of the
Secret Intelligence Service The Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), commonly known as MI6 (MI numbers, Military Intelligence, Section 6), is the foreign intelligence service of the United Kingdom, tasked mainly with the covert overseas collection and analysis of Human i ...
following their move from 54 Broadway in 1964. Though the location of their Broadway headquarters was classified information, ''
The Daily Telegraph ''The Daily Telegraph'', known online and elsewhere as ''The Telegraph'', is a British daily broadsheet conservative newspaper published in London by Telegraph Media Group and distributed in the United Kingdom and internationally. It was found ...
'' reported that it was "London's worst-kept secret, known only to every taxi driver, tourist guide and KGB agent". After 21 years in service as the headquarters of SIS, Century House was described as "irredeemably insecure" in a 1985 National Audit Office (NAO) report with several security concerns raised. Chief among those concerns was that the building was made largely of glass, and had a petrol station at its base. The Secret Intelligence Service moved its headquarters to
Vauxhall Cross Vauxhall ( , ) is an area of South London, within the London Borough of Lambeth. Named after a medieval manor called Fox Hall, it became well known for the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens. From the Victorian period until the mid-20th century, Va ...
in 1994 and the Century House building was refurbished and converted into the residential Perspective Building, designed by Assael Architecture in 2001.


References

{{Coord, 51.49873, N, 0.11016, W, region:GB-BKM_type:landmark, display=title Buildings and structures in the London Borough of Southwark Intelligence agency headquarters in the United Kingdom MI6