No. 1 Croydon
office block in Croydon, south London
No. 1 Croydon (formerly the NLA Tower, and colloquially the 50p Building, the Weddingcake or the Threepenny bit building) is a tall building at 12–16 Addiscombe Road, Croydon, Greater London, next to East Croydon station. It was designed by Richard Seifert & Partners and completed in 1970. It has 24 storeys and is 269 feet (82 m) high. NLA stood for Noble Lowndes Annuities, the original principal tenant (subsequently taken over by the Hill Samuel Group). It was one of many new buildings constructed in the growing town of Croydon in the 1960s. The development of tall buildings was later encouraged in the 2004 London Plan, which led to the erection of new skyscrapers as Greater London went through a high-rise boom.
Construction
The building was erected between 1968 and 1970. Its distinctive appearance arises from its octagonal floor plans (not, in fact, regular octagons, but squares with splayed or truncated corners), set above one another on alternating orientations.
Construction was delayed by the objections of Miss Kathleen Harding, a solicitor and leasehold tenant of the Victorian East Bridge House, which stood on part of the intended site.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7043088. Authority coordinates are 51.375, -0.091. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1970, 2004 and 1968.
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This entry incorporates text from “No. 1 Croydon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.