A Selection Of Unusual Buildings Scattered Across The UK

There are some incredible feats of modern architecture dotted around the UK which demonstrate inventiveness and help give this wonderful country of ours an enormous amount of unique character. If everything looked the same it would be incredibly boring. It’s good to be different.

We’ve picked out a few of our favourites:

The Bullring

Located in the heart of Birmingham and spanning 110,000m2, the Bullring is one of the country’s largest shopping centres and has a highly distinctive façade at one end clad with 15,000 shiny aluminium discs. Built in 2003, it resembles the toy you used to get as a kid that contained hundreds of tiny silver pins into which you would place your face to create a mould and shake to make it disappear. It was voted ‘Britain’s Ugliest building’ in 2008.

Lord’s Media Centre

Upon being unveiled in 1999, the design of the Media Centre at the Home of Cricket was harshly compared to ‘Cherie Blair’s mouth’ though it would be fair to say that it more than bears a resemblance to some kind of spaceship. Costing just £5million to build, it’s the world’s only single-shell aluminium building and houses the many reporters and journalists in attendance during county games and Test matches.

Wales Millennium Centre

It’s perhaps not the structure of the Wales Millennium Centre that makes it unusual, more the bilingual inscription that’s emblazoned above its entrance. It reads ‘In These Stones Horizons Sing’ and, ‘Creu Gwir Fel Gwydr o Ffwrnais Awen’, the latter translating as ‘Creating truth like glass from the furnace of inspiration’. Since opening in 2004, it has become Wales’ most popular tourist attraction and plays host to musicals, opera, ballet and dance.

Lloyd’s Building

In amongst The Shard, The Gherkin, and the many other iconic London landmarks, is the Lloyd’s Building, home of Lloyd’s of London and instantly recognisable due to having pipes and lifts on the outside, hence its nickname the “inside-out” building. Opened in 1986 after eight years of construction, it is now a Grade 1 listed building, the youngest building to be granted such status, and utilises 12,000 square metres of glass.