Look up at that square tower with the windows arranged in three vertical rows on every side. Those windows are not decoration. Read them. Circle, cross, circle. On all four faces of the building. That spells OXO, and it exists because of an advertising ban and a very clever architect.
You can still go up. The top floor is a free public viewing gallery, open every day, looking straight down the river toward Saint Paul's. It's one of the few high-up views in central London that costs nothing at all — tucked above a building whose entire reason for existing was getting around a rule about what you're allowed to look at.
In the nineteen twenties, London banned illuminated advertising along the river, trying to protect the skyline from exactly the kind of corporate branding everyone now takes photos of. The company that owned this building, which made Oxo beef stock cubes, wanted their name lit up on the tower anyway. Told no, they hired an architect named Albert Moore, and he handed them
a loophole instead of a fight. He designed the windows themselves in the shape of a circle, a cross, and a circle — repeated up all four sides of the tower. Since the letters were literally the building's windows and not a sign bolted onto it, the council had no grounds to object. It wasn't advertising. It was architecture. London banned the sign and got the building anyway.
The tower didn't sta
