Britannia

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Britannia by Francis Derwent Wood, 1924
Britannic House
Moorgate, City of London
London, September 2006

“Britannic House designed by Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens. On the north-west side of Finsbury Circus, London EC2, with front on the road leading into the Circus from the west and on Moorgate. Designed by Lutyens for the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which later became British Petroleum. One of Sir Francis Derment Wood's statues of Britannia appears at the corner of the of the building in the photograph at left. The right photograph shows the position of Britannia and the Indian Water Carrier. In his magisterial and massive history of architecture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Henry-Russell Hitchcock points out that ‘it fell to Lutyens's lot to build some of the biggest business structures erected anywhere outside America’ in the first three decades of the twentieth century. ‘Lutyens's most successful big business building is doubtless Britannic House of 1924-7. This profits from the site between Finsbury Circus and Moorgate Street, the curve of the circus giving to the eastern front a certain major Baroque drama that is echoed in the versatile play with seventeenth-eighteenth-century in the detailing’.” (Britannic House, The Victorian Web)