The 355|Senate House — The Tower That Plays Every Ministry in London

Charles Holden designed Senate House to look permanent, and it does: sixty-four metres of Portland stone stepping back in stages off Malet Street, opened in 1937 and never finished to the original plan. The 355 sends Mace, Marie, Graciela and Khadijah into it for the event sequence, using Senate House Library on the upper floors, and the building does on screen what it always does — it reads as an institution with money and something to hide.

That reputation is older than the film. The Ministry of Information occupied the building through the Second World War, and George Orwell, whose wife worked inside it, is generally taken to have had it in mind when he built the Ministry of Truth. Since then it has stood in for government departments, hospitals and headquarters across British film and television, often without a single line of dialogue naming it.

The reading rooms are the part worth the trip: dark wood, brass fittings, tall windows, and a collection that has sat in the same rooms since before the war. Visitors can buy day access, and the ground-floor exhibitions are free and change regularly.

Take the stairs rather than the lift and stop on the fourth-floor landing to look back down the stairwell. Holden built the vertical circulation as the spine of the whole thing, and from there the tower finally reads as one solid object rather than a facade with rooms behind it.

Location photo via Wikimedia Commons.