SIS Building

Where it sits. The SIS Building occupies the whole block at 85 Albert Embankment, on the south bank of the Thames immediately upstream of Vauxhall Bridge, in the London Borough of Lambeth. It faces the river across a bend, with Millbank and Tate Britain directly opposite on the north bank and the Palace of Westminster a kilometre downstream. The site was once the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, London's great eighteenth-century entertainment ground, closed in 1859; industry followed, and excavation for the new building turned up seventeenth-century glass kilns, barge houses and the remains of an inn called The Vine. The rail viaduct into Waterloo runs behind it, and the towers of the Nine Elms redevelopment now crowd it on three sides in a way that has flattened its silhouette considerably since it opened.

The story behind it. Britain's foreign intelligence service moved here in 1994 from Century House on Westminster Bridge Road, a glass-fronted 1960s block with a filling station at its base that a National Audit Office report in 1985 called irredeemably insecure and which taxi drivers had known about for years. The site at Vauxhall was bought by developers in 1983, and a competition for it was won by the architect Terry Farrell. Margaret Thatcher approved the purchase for SIS in 1988; the National Audit Office put the final bill at £135.05 million for the site and basic building, or £152.6 million once the service's specialist requirements were added. It was completed in April 1994 and opened by Elizabeth II that July. The design borrows openly from 1930s industrial modernism — Farrell has cited Bankside and Battersea power stations — with a stepped, ziggurat massing that critics have variously read as Mayan temple, Art Deco machine and Gotham City set-dressing. It carries about 12,000 square metres of glass and aluminium in twenty-five different types, triple-glazed throughout, sixty separate roof areas and two moats. Much of the working floor area is below ground.

On screen. No real building in London has been destroyed more often on film. Vauxhall Cross first appeared as MI6 headquarters in GoldenEye (1995), the year after the service actually moved in, and has anchored the geography of the series ever since. In The World Is Not Enough (1999) an explosion tears through the riverside face in the pre-title sequence, launching the Thames boat chase that ends downriver at the Millennium Dome in Greenwich. In Skyfall (2012) Silva's gas explosion collapses a section of the embankment frontage; Vauxhall Bridge and Millbank were closed to traffic for the location work, and a fifteen-metre model of the building was constructed at Pinewood for the destruction shots. In Spectre (2015) the derelict building is rigged for a controlled demolition that becomes the setting of the finale, with river filming near Vauxhall Cross in May 2015. Bond arrives here again in No Time to Die (2021) in the brown Aston Martin V8 Vantage. A staff-only premiere of Skyfall was held in the building itself, and the audience reportedly cheered when their own headquarters blew up.

What you can and cannot do. This is a working intelligence headquarters with no public access of any kind, and since 1 June 2007 the building and its curtilage have been designated a protected site under section 128 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, which makes trespass a specific criminal offence. Photography from public highways and the river is not itself unlawful, and the building is photographed daily from Vauxhall Bridge, but lingering with long lenses at the perimeter attracts attention, and it should. The threat has been real: in September 2000 an RPG-22 rocket, attributed to dissident Irish republicans, was fired at the building from Spring Gardens park and exploded against an eighth-floor window, and in 2010 a parcel bomb was intercepted at its postal handling centre.

What you actually see. Sand-coloured precast concrete, bands of green-tinted glass, stepped setbacks and heavy corner towers, best read from the middle of Vauxhall Bridge, where the whole composition resolves. From the north bank at Millbank, with the river in front, it looks like the fortress it is. The nicknames tell you how Londoners feel about it: Legoland, Babylon-on-Thames, and, less kindly, Ceaușescu Towers. Deyan Sudjic called it an epitaph for the architecture of the 1980s, which is about right.

Getting there and timing. Vauxhall station sits behind the building, served by the Victoria line and South Western Railway from Waterloo, with a large bus interchange alongside. Vauxhall Bridge and the Thames Path give the two best vantage points, both step-free. Combine it with Tate Britain across the water, the Vauxhall city farm or the walk downstream past Lambeth Palace to Westminster. Dusk in winter, when the setbacks are lit and the river is black, is when the building most resembles its screen version.