War Office

You are standing before the Old War Office, a massive Edwardian Baroque structure that occupies an entire city block. Completed in 1906, it was designed to be the administrative engine of the British Army. To fit the building onto this irregularly shaped site, architect William Young built it in the form of a trapezoid, adding four grand domes specifically to disguise its strange geometry from the street. Behind those stone walls, over one thousand offices are connected by two and a half miles of corridors, a scale so vast that during the First World War, staff members were known to ride bicycles indoors just to deliver messages.