Finsbury Business Centre, London

Architect	F W Troup & H R Steele
Date Built	1937
Location	Bowling Green Lane
Description
This large building on the corner of Northampton Road and Bowling Green Lane is home in 2017 to the Finsbury Business Centre and the London Metropolitan Archives.  It was built in 1937 to a design by F. W. Troup and H. R. Steele, for the Temple Press Ltd, an established publisher of specialist and technical journals.  The company had premises on Rosebery Avenue but purchased this site to add substantial printing and binding works and offices to their business. The british-history.ac.uk website describes the building as having, "... a reinforced-concrete frame (that) rises five and six storeys (over basements) to flat roofs. The bulk of the elevations is mitigated by stringcourses along the brickfaced walls and the expanses of window."  There were apparently plans to extend the building further along Northampton Road but that never materialized. In 1981 the lower storeys of the building were modified to house the Greater London Records Office.  In 1986 that became the London Metropolitan Archives. In 1991 a large purpose-built building was added on Northampton Road that accommodates 10 linear miles of shelving and housing nearly a third of the Archive's collection.  The building, shown below (and connected to the original building by the bridge you can see above)  was designed by the Culpin Partnership.

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