University of London

The year is 1943, and somewhere within these Art Deco walls, a woman named Eileen Blair sits at her desk in the Censorship Department, quietly reading intercepted letters while her husband George scribbles notes about this very building for a novel he's planning. You're standing before Senate House, where George Orwell's wife worked for the secret Ministry of Information during World War Two, and where the towering limestone facade you see became his inspiration for the Ministry of Truth in "1984." Charles Holden designed this 210-foot giant with nineteen floors to last five hundred years, using over thirteen hundred concrete piles driven deep beneath Malet Street to support what was London's second tallest building when it opened in 1937. The Portland Stone cladding gleams with the same Art Deco elegance Holden perfected designing Underground stations, but hidden behind that serene exterior lies a building that secretly housed Britain's wartime propaganda machine. Step through those bronze doors and you'll enter halls where Lord Hugh Macmillan faced the peculiar dilemma of being both the University's Chairman and the Minister who commandeered the building, making him simultaneously landlord and tenant. The Rockefeller Foundation's four hundred thousand pound gift created this academic fortress in Bloomsbury, though Holden's grand vision was cut short by war, leaving only this single tower of his massive planned complex. Today, as you explore the corridors where spies once walked and the Senate House Library where two million books now rest, remember that every corner whispers stories of academic ambition, wartime secrets, and a writer's wife who helped inspire literature's most famous dystopia.