Letter: Demolition call

Sir: While sharing the concern of the Twentieth Century Society that so many fine buildings of the 1920s and 1930s, having survived the War and post-War planning, are now threatened by decay, disuse and demolition ("Classic buildings decay before they can be listed", 19 November), let us remember that in one of the most grievous calamities of the London Blitz the bombs of the Luftwaffe tragically missed the Faraday Building in Queen Victoria Street, London.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the architectural historian, does not even condescend to name the architect. "It was called a disgrace directly it went up" (in 1932) he wrote. "It was nine storeys, and its skyline does untold damage to that of St Paul's."

The millennium will be celebrated by the demolition of Marsham Towers, which now wreck the view of the Palace of Westminster.

Yet Faraday Building still rises, green and white like a monstrous Italian ice-cream, in an area and against a background where even the insensitive developers of the 1960s were obliged to maintain a tactfully low profile.

PETER FORSTER

London N4