Seeing “This Brutal House” posting a better photo of the same, the BMW headquarters in Munich.
This photo: me, 2019
Soon the grille on BMWs will be about that size
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Didn’t look quite like this (no typewriters etc) when I spent some time there but there was a bit of a Bauhaus feel to the central open spaces.
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BT seems to have continually built the ugliest building possible in every town they have a presence. It’s a standing joke amongst the staff. “When you get out the train station look for the ugliest building you can see and that will be the office”.
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Leased by BT, not built. But yeah, they do occupy some fugly buildings.
I’m pretty sure some skulldugery was going on when they sold the buildings to a company owned by BT group then leased them back to BT then bought the company they owned back again a number of years ago. With the new buildings it seems to be normal lease deal. It will provide lots of employment in Bristol though and they pay isn’t horrendous so hope it’s a success for employees and the company
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BT sold off most of their property 20 years ago to partially fund the squillions they spent on 3G mobile licences.
In Bristol they own very few properties now beyond exchanges.
Good to see they are investing there again. Shit load of MOD money for BT down that way. Hopefully it will help the locals get half decent jobs. I’ve not been down for maybe 15 years, the disparity with Bath for two cities so close really shocked me. I did prefer Bristol as it seemed to have an edge to it
The old telephone exchange is at the top of a cul-de-sac next to me. Every single planning application for a really ugly building basically has the line “well there’s no point making it attractive, look at the telephone exchange!”
Cunts.
I came across one of the old pre BT exchages in Bristol, i think from memory on a street imaginatively named Exhange St or somesuch. Lovely old building long since repurposed.
A lot of the post war national infrastructure exchanges that were thrown up were substantial concrete buildings. I suspect it was an easy material to build with, could support the sheer weight of those analogue exchanges and importantly was robust. The latter lesson coming from the war, make them as bomb proof as possible and to a degree survivable in a nuclear exchange.
They largely never had windows on the ground floor, again another security measure.
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Telephone avenue, just looked it up.
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I wish I had the room for that.
I could accommodate that in my garden (would make a handy wind break!) but I’m not sure that SIC Planning Dep’t would be too impressed 
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