2 Marsham Street

2 Marsham Street is an office building on Marsham Street in the City of Westminster, London, and headquarters of the Home Office and Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (and its predecessor bodies), departments of the British Government, since March 2005. Before this date the Home Office was located at 50 Queen Anne's Gate. It has also housed the headquarters of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs since 2018. History The site was previously occupied by the Departments of Environment (DoE) and Transport (DfT). The headquarters offices of both departments were located in Marsham Towers—three 20-floor concrete towers (North, Centre and South) joined together by 'podium' floors to level 3. The towers won an architectural award, and boasted express lifts, marble entrances and escalators to the third floor—very modern government offices for the early 1970s. Construction had started in the early 1960s but was finally completed in 1971, becoming the office of the new DoE created in October 1970 (out of a merger between the Ministry of Housing and Local Government and the Ministry of Transport). The towers were considered by some to be a blot on London's landscape, and were subsequently nicknamed "the three ugly sisters" and "the toast rack". Michael Heseltine, the Secretary of State for the Environment in the late 1970s and early 1980s, allegedly said that the building offered the best view of London—because one could not see the towers from his north-facing 16th-floor office in the North tower. Chris Patten called the complex "a building that deeply depresses the spirit". The last government staff occupied the building in the late 1990s. The building was declared unfit for future use and the towers were demolished in 2003 to make way for the new building into which the Home Office moved in 2005. Prior to the 'ugly sisters' epoch, from about 1818, the site housed the Chartered Gas Works of the Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company, as well as a laundry yard.