Melboune Street
Land was acquired for this site in 1929 for the then General Post Office.
The first buildings are constructed in 1932 as General Stores, a Workshop and Garages.
These were demolished in 1966 to make way for the present development.
The current building was phase one of eleven, which was to include a further twenty two storey building with a planned capacity of twenty four thousand people by 1980.
Building construction started in 1969 and was completed in 1972.
Final cost was £1,218,401.
My thanks to Sonna Lawrence BT employee, for his time and information.
There is little by way of background information online, save for this thread.
It’s officially The Hadrian Trunk Switching Centre and it is indeed owned by BT. It’s just a telephone exchange with a handful of staff. I only know this as I used to work for BT 150 customer service when ISDN was being rolled out 20 years ago and when there was a fault in the Newcastle area it was usually something going wrong in this building.
I’ve heard that it goes down as far as it goes up.
Someone has mentioned the basement which is legendary amongst the people who work there. Some say it’s a nuclear bunker, some say there’s a tunnel that goes to the other BT building in Carliol Square, others say there’s nothing down there.
The rumour always was that the central core was nuclear bomb proof so people in power could still make phonecalls and there is also a service tunnel going across to the CTE on the other side of the central motorway.
One online source suggests it may have been designed by the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works.
Mainstream Modern informs us that the design team was:
Thomas F Winterburn – Senior Architect MoPBW.
W Freeman – Senior Civil Engineer.
E.W. Hutchinson – Project Engineer.
Working as an architectural assistant in Colchester Borough Engineer’s Office in 1935, Winterburn was with the Ministry from the at least the mid-1950s, he is recorded as the Senior Architect for Norwich’s Post Office Sorting Office in 1955. He was also responsible for the now demolished Milburngate House in Durham that housed the Passport Office.
All that aside I took a look around outside, come along circumnavigate along with me.
modernmooch.com 