The Ministry of Justice building on Petty France in Westminster is a large government complex that exemplifies the institutional brutalism of the postwar British state: long, horizontal, purposeful, and completely uninterested in charm. Its concrete and glass facades present a blunt face to the surrounding streets, the window grids and service elements articulated with the characteristic directness of the period.
Government buildings of this type — designed to house large bureaucracies, to process people and paperwork efficiently, to last — represent a civic confidence that has since retreated. The material language was expensive to maintain and easy to resent; the buildings often outlasted the institutions they were designed to project.