Minerva Building

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The Minerva Building was a skyscraper once planned for the eastern edge of London's main financial district, the City of London. If built, it would have been the first building in the City of London to contain more than 1,000,000 sq ft of office space.

A revised planning application by developers Minerva plc for the 53-storey version was submitted during the week ending July 12, 2002. The original proposal for the site, known as the St. Botolph's House, was a 14-storey office block. In 2001 this was revised to a 36-storey, 159m tall office tower. A post-September 11 revision brought structural and design changes and a further increase in height, to 53 floors and 217m.

Its location marks the Eastern gateway to the City and the building might have acted as a focus for the regeneration of the eastern City fringe. The site is outside the strategic views of St. Paul's, and does not contain listed buildings, although it does infringe upon a conservation area. It also lies within one of the three proposed viewing cones for the Tower of London, as do 30 St Mary Axe, 110 Bishopsgate, Tower 42.

Although the official height was 217m, the building was claimed to have planning permission for an antenna which might have seen its pinnacle height rise to 247 metres. The developers claimed that a restaurant would have been open to the public on the highest floor.

In March 2006, amidst the Cash for Peerages political scandal, it emerged that the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister had not called in the application for the Minerva Building (nor Minerva's Park Place proposals in Croydon) shortly after two of Minerva's senior figures had made major donations and loans to the Labour Party. This led some commentators to make a connection between the loans and the decision.^[1]

In mid-2006 it was announced that Minerva, deep within a period of financial consolidation, were no longer actively pursuing development of the site. A buyer has been sought and a planning application for a mid-rise commercial development is expected by early 2007.