M inster Court, a pink granite-and-marble neo-gothic office block in the City of London , a work of 1980s excess sometimes known as Monster Court or Dracula’s Castle, is to be defanged. Its owner M&G Real Estate is going to obliterate its pointy bits and “reimagine” its entrance, in order to create “a landmark in sustainable design”, and provide such things as a “tenant amenity village”, a roof terrace, and a “new cultural offer”. Also, perhaps most relevantly to their bottom line, they want to smother it in several extra floors of office space, to the extent that there will be little recognisable left.
Last week, attempts to list this unique work having failed, ominous hoardings went up around it. This building, which served as Cruella de Vil’s headquarters in the 1996 version of 101 Dalmatians , got a mixed critical reception when it was finished. But as is often the way with architecture that dares to be tasteless, it has won hearts since.
The Twentieth Century Society , which fought for its retention, says that “the Square Mile will be so much the poorer and blander without its theatrical slice of Gotham on the skyline”, and it’s hard to disagree. On previous occasions when I’ve written about the Odesa-born billionaire Leonard Blavatnik, currently sanctioned by Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his people have reacted badly to my calling him an “oligarch”. So I’ll only say that, as the Financial Times put it, he “ reaped phenomenal riches from the c.
