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Shell Centre, in London is one of the two "central offices" of oil major Shell (the other is in The Hague). It is located on Belvedere Road in the London Borough of Lambeth. It is a prominent feature on the South Bank of the River Thames near County Hall, and now forms the backdrop to the London Eye. Shell Centre was constructed in 1961, to a design by Sir Howard Robertson, and the tower stands at with 27 storeys (26 numbered and a mezzanine level) and extends three storeys below ground. The tower was the first London office tower to exceed the height of the Victoria Tower of the Palace of Westminster. It replaced the Midland Grand Hotel as the tallest storied building in London, and the Royal Liver Building as the tallest in the United Kingdom. On completion the building also held the record for the largest office building, by floor space, in Europe.〔Christopher Winn, ''I never knew that about London'' (Ted Smart 2007) pg227.〕 The current Shell Centre comprises the tower building and three adjoining nine-storey wings (collectively formerly known as the "Upstream Building"). The original development also included a separate building known as the "Downstream Building", which was separated from the Upstream Building by the railway viaduct between Charing Cross and Waterloo East. The Downstream Building was disposed of by Shell in the 1990s and is now a block of residential apartments known as the White House, and has been heightened by a storey. ==Site history and layout== Shell Centre occupies part of the site cleared for the 1951 Festival of Britain. The areas closer to the River Thames now include Jubilee Gardens and the South Bank Centre. Jubilee Gardens remained undeveloped prior to its laying out as an open space, largely because of a restrictive covenant in favour of Shell that restricts any building on the part of the site directly between the Shell Tower and the River Thames. The naming of the Shell Centre buildings perpetuated the split of the Festival site into distinct Upstream and Downstream areas – separated by the railway viaduct approach to Hungerford Bridge. During construction, parts of abandoned works for the Waterloo and Whitehall Railway were discovered. This was a prototype for a proposed pneumatic railway that would have run under the River Thames linking Waterloo and Charing Cross. Digging was started in 1865 but was stopped in 1868 due to financial problems. Involved in the proposal was Thomas Webster Rammell, who was also responsible for the Crystal Palace Pneumatic Railway and the London Pneumatic Despatch Company. Visible in the Thames at low tide just in line with the tower as water turbulence at one point a few feet into the river bed is the outflow point of the Shell Centre's air conditioning system, which sucks in river water from just outside County Hall and sends it via a pipe within a bolt iron tunnel (built exactly like a tube railway tunnel), to a point convergent with the outfall, then both the intake pipe and the outflow pipes continue under the embankment and Jubilee Gardens to the basement of the tower. From here the water is sent through filters and heat exchangers to provide cooled air in the building. The pipes had to be especially supported on adjustable jacks during excavation work for the extension of the Jubilee line in 1995 because of settlement during the driving of an access tunnel out from Jubilee Gardens to the main running lines in York Road via Chicheley Street. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Shell Centre」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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