Why London should mourn the imminent loss of its ugliest building

There is something stirring in the Nine Elms region of South London. A great rupture of steel and glass is in the process of splitting open the ground like some dormant kraken waking from subterranean sleep.

Battersea Power Station is in the process of being interred in a tomb of reflective cladding; the iconic chimneys being replaced with replicas like a magician’s sleight-of-hand trick being drawn out over several months.

It is here more than anywhere that London’s structural obeisance to obscene capital flows is at its most striking. All of these storage vaults for the wealth of Gulf states that masquerade as luxury apartments can be characterised by their generic blandness. If they appear to be sprouting up unnoticed then it's perhaps because they are so defined by their innocuous visual impact, scarcely more real than the CAD representations displayed on the site hoardings that enclose their construction.

Yet there is one building now facing imminent demolition that surely deserves some kind of lamentation, seen as how it can, in my view, make a strong contention for the dubious honour of being the ugliest building in London.

On South Lambeth Road, lurching over Vauxhall Bus Station, Keybridge House is an uncompromising masterpiece of the Brutalist form. In a city strewn with carbuncles, this steals the crown principally because it stands as a sneering riposte to accepted aesthetic conventions. It is like a terminally-grey castle built on a beach of ash by an architect who must have been suffering a severe depressive episode.

Built for the Post Office in 1975 and later bought by BT for use as a telephone exchange, there are all kinds of rumours of it being used as a base for MI6’s network of ‘spooks’, in between their liaisons in the surrounding cafes and bars of ‘Little Portugal’.

There are theories of tunnels extending out like tentacles from the depths of its vast basement, heightened microwave activity being detectable, and mysterious black vehicles that are seen entering but never leaving, like a Willy Wonka’s factory for which no amount of free chocolate would entice anyone inside.

With its harsh concrete facade, steel bracketing, windows enmired with the grime from exhaust fumes and bird shit, the opprobrium levelled against it is understandable. And yet the sensible response should be to celebrate the diversity of the built environment, looking to such structures as a means of reference for the different phases and periods of recent social history.

There is something quite grand about Keybridge’s unsightliness, something formidable and strangely impressive about a building designed with such scant aesthetical consideration.

With its severe geometrics and spindly pipes supporting one flank, it could almost be seen as a grim prototype for the modern ‘Bowellism’ style that became associated with the likes of Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano in such buildings as the Pompidou Centre and Lloyd’s (see above). And what is the purpose of the vast basement if not a pre-empting of the ‘iceberg’ extensions currently being scooped out in Chelsea and Kensington?

If nothing else, it can certainly be relied upon to provoke a reaction in those who observe it; a very physical riposte to buildings like the Shard whose mirage-like form reveals the invisible currents of capital that propelled them into being.

Whilst the locals will shed few tears at the sight of Keybridge House crumbling into dust, the arrival of yet another banal monument to capital, whilst being visually more delicate, must surely erect psychological scaffolds of doubt and insecurity for the long-term viability of being able to call the area home.