Faraday Building

 

Faraday Building (green roof, center)
St. Paul's Cathedral (upper right)
Some modern abominstion (lower left)
Thames River (bottom)

Brian Micklethwait put up some pictures of St. Paul's Cathedral and noted that the Faraday building partially blocks the view of St. Paul's from across the river. The Faraday Building? That sounds kind of cool in a 19th Century kind of steampunkish / electrical engineering kind of way. I mean, Faraday was one of the founding fathers of our electrified world. Alas, only the name has survived, all remnants of the telephone exchange that it was originally built to house are gone leaving just more pedestrian businesses. Google Maps doesn't even recognize it as the Faraday Building. Google puts it three miles south, across the river in Camberwell.

I couldn't find a decent picture of the building so once again I resorted to using Google's 3D Viewer.

Telephone Keystone on the Faraday Building

There is still a stone telephone on the outside of the building, so not all of it's history has been erased.