This neighbourhood is centred on Old Broad Street, from the City of London Club on the southern end to Deutsche Bank’s Head Office to the north of the street. The buildings around it are mainly concrete and stone, complementing the old Victorian structures which you’ll find squeezed into these narrow streets. In the middle of this, is a large glass complex leading to Regus London Tower 42, a skyscraper which acts as a landmark for this neighbourhood area. The area mostly houses banks, though many cafes and chain stores exist at ground level. Several bus routes run through the area, including three night bus routes. Liverpool Street railway station is at most a straightforward 500-metre walk away.

In April 1993, the IRA detonated a bomb in the area, killing one person and causing £1 billion of damage – the NatWest Tower (as it was known then) bore most of the blast and cost £75 million to refurbish. This may have contributed to English Heritage’s decision nearly 30 years later for the tower not to be entered into an inventory of post-war buildings (owing to a lack of original features), paving the way for its potential demolition in the future.

Richard Seifert designed Tower 42, as he did with the, now well known, Centrepoint tower on Tottenham Court Road. He was said to have influenced the London skyline more than any other person since Christopher Wren, designing around 600 buildings in London in numerous circumventions or manipulations of planning laws. His architecture provided vast amounts of rental and office space while avoiding box-like blandness (indeed, even his office desk was said to be V-shaped).

Tower 42 is the third tallest skyscraper in the City of London and the eighth tallest in Greater London. Originally, the National Westminster Tower (or NatWest Tower), it was built for the eponymous bank’s international headquarters (this can still be seen from above, whereby the shape of the tower resembles the bank’s logo). It was London’s first ‘true’ skyscraper by international standards, and was the UK’s tallest building for more than a decade (overtaken by 1 Canada Square in Canary Wharf). The tower introduced many new design features to the UK, including an express lift service from the ground floor to levels 23 and 24, as well as double-decker lifts.

The area is at the heart of the City of London financial district, and with that comes a great deal of congestion and people during the weekdays. This, however, is offset by the large amounts of restaurants as well as social pubs dotted around the area, though admittedly many are closed on the weekends. This rush-hour congestion is only set to increase, with the recent expansion of nearby Liverpool Street adding the new Elizabeth Line to its already expansive repertoire of transport links. Passengers are now just six minutes from Canary Wharf in the east and are directly connected to Heathrow and the Thames Valley commuter belt to the west. Further work is scheduled for the station in the coming years, with 1.5 billion set to be spent on a regeneration of the grade-II listed building. Just north of this postcode, opposite Finsbury Circus, a mixed use commercial development at 60 London Wall was recently completed, featuring curved glass architecture which Londoners will recognise as typical of the City of London.