There was a time when public buildings were respected, even utilitarian structures like the telephone exchange in Shoreditch.The building, erected by the General Post Office in 1956, is plain but carefully proportioned and adorned with this nice figure of a nude telephone engineer winding cables round the Earth - those are electromechanical relays above his head.
The exchange has a certain notoriety among Cold War conspiracy theorists as one end of a secret nuke-proof tunnel carrying government phone lines. It links up exchanges all the way to Shepherd's Bush.
Now the building is shabby and ill-used. The entrance is covered with grilles and metal doors, the windows are covered with stick-on plastic sheeting and it looks as if BT keeps the place on mainly as a place to park its vans.
