Back in 2010, I photographed the Angel Building just after Allford Hall Monaghan Morris and Derwent London had finished pulling it back from the brink. What had once been a drab, unloved 1980s office block had been given a new life. Not just cleaned up, not just modernised, but completely rethought. With style, confidence and just a little nod to transatlantic architectural culture.
The bones of an old BT building were kept—the original concrete frame, all still there—but it was opened out, extended, and wrapped in an elegant glazed skin . At its centre, what used to be a dead service courtyard is now a vast six-storey atrium. This space is extraordinary: top-lit by a translucent roof that throws soft, diffused daylight through the building. No glare, just a calm, even glow that shifts with the sky and reflects subtly off the exposed concrete surfaces. From a photographer’s perspective, it’s a dream—light that wraps and reveals, with depth and shadow. The atrium becomes a sculpture to be involved with.
And it’s not just light that defines the atrium— Ian McChesney’s Out of the Strong Came Forth Sweetness commands the space. It’s a 22-metre carbon-fibre curve that sweeps down from above and lands gently in a leather seating bench, referencing the old Lyle’s syrup tin and that long, glistening thread of treacle, curling from your spoon. It’s delicate and bold all at once. It gives the space a centre of gravity, a sense of theatre. And crucially, it’s tactile. This isn’t a to be admired from a distance. It invites you to sit, to pause, to relax into this extraordinary volume.
And then there’s the concrete. Louis Kahn would nod in approval. AHMM absolutely got it right. You feel the material; you read the structure.
What’s fascinating is how much of the original building survives—and how little it resembles what was there before. By retaining and extending the concrete frame, the project saved 7,400 tonnes of embodied carbon. That’s not a statistic for the brochure, it’s a meaningful shift in how we should think about buildings.
AHMM have made a speciality out of thoughtful reuse. There’s a discipline to working with what’s already there, and a kind of elegance that comes from constraint. No tricks, no gimmicks—just smart, sustainable architecture. There’s a commendable lack of ego in a team that is willing to engage, to witness and to celebrate the work of the past, all the while preparing the old for a new future.
Fifteen years on, the building is still doing its job beautifully. It’s full, it’s functional, and it still feels fresh. You walk in and it works. The Angel Building is a quiet triumph. And from behind a lens, it’s a space that constantly rewards with endless new vistas of revealed form, the potential for a new portfolio, everyday.
