BT Centre

The BT Centre in London was until 2021 the global headquarters and registered office of BT Group. It occupied a 10-storey office building on Newgate Street in the City of London, opposite St Paul's tube station.[1] It was opened in June, 1984.

BT Centre
General information
Location	London, England, UK
Coordinates	51.5156°N 0.0978°W / 51.5156; -0.0978
Opened	1985

The building was designed for British Telecom by the Property Services Agency in a 'modern and forward-looking' style (though its Portland stone and granite facings recalled the Central Telegraph Office, which had previously stood on the site).[2] The main entrance, on Newgate Street, was built on the alignment of Bath Street, which had been closed since 1934 and was completely covered by the new building. In 1997-99 the interior of the building was substantially updated, 'to make better use of space, conform to modern approaches to working, and exploit the latest telecommunications technology for more effective and fulfilling working'.[2]

In 2019, BT sold the building and revealed plans to relocate their offices to 1 Braham Street near Aldgate East station.[3] Their new headquarters was opened in November 2021.[4]

Commemorative plaque on the building.

A plaque on the outside of the building marks this as the location from which Guglielmo Marconi made the first public transmission of wireless signals, in 1897 while it was the Central Telegraph Office building of the General Post Office complex.[5] The Telegraph Office building was originally built in 1874. It was damaged by a German bomb in 1917,[2] and more severely damaged by bombing in 1940[6] when the interior was burned out; it reopened in 1943. By the 1950s, the volume of telegraph traffic had declined; the Telegraph Office closed in 1963,[2] Subsequently, the building was declared unsafe and was demolished in 1967.[7] Following archaeological investigations by the Museum of London, planning permission was granted for the new building in 1979.[2]