Senate House Building

About Senate House Building

Ceremonial and administrative centre of the University of London

Senate House is the administrative and ceremonial centre of the University of London, situated in the heart of Bloomsbury immediately north of the British Museum. The Art Deco building was constructed between 1932 and 1937 as the first phase of a large uncompleted scheme designed for the university by Charles Holden, architect of London's famous Underground stations, in white Portland stone; it has 19 floors and stands 64 metres (210 feet) high, and on completion it was the second-tallest building in London after St Paul's Cathedral, its severe stepped tower a landmark of the Bloomsbury skyline. During the Second World War the building was used by the Ministry of Information, inspiring two works of English fiction: Graham Greene's novel The Ministry of Fear (1943), filmed by Fritz Lang in 1944, and the description of the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which evokes the building; Orwell's wife Eileen worked here in the ministry's Censorship Department, and the building later featured in the film of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Today it houses the university's Central Academic Bodies and the offices of the vice-chancellor, the entire Senate House Library of some three million books, including 120,000 printed before 1851, over 5,200 journals, 170,000 theses and the university archives, six of the eight research institutes of the School of Advanced Study and departments of the distance-learning University of London Worldwide. Wikivoyage describes it as the Art Deco headquarters of the University of London featured in the film Nineteen Eighty-Four, a stop for architecture lovers on a Bloomsbury walk between the British Museum and Russell Square.

Where:

London, United Kingdom