The Tower Project – Euston

‘The angels are uncertain if they are living among the living or the dead”

In 1999 the Euston Tower (a 1970, standard issue, office tower block) was being refurbished.

Deborah Warner took the opportunity to put in the Tower Project installation.

You took the lift to where she had taken three floors near the summit – 30 floors up. You then wandered along the silent, empty corridors – taking as long as you pleased. Amidst the abandoned office detritus of filing cabinets, swivel chairs and desks were fax machines churning out Paradise Lost. An angel’s trumpet lying on the floor. Rooms carpeted with angel’s feathers. And later real angels and cherubs. Reclining, standing, resting. Black winged Lucifer brooding in a locked office.

Looking down across Regent’s Park at an unreachable office in a glass apex on a lower floor – an angel gazing down at London.

Up here in the interregnum before normal capitalist business resumed. The angels nodded out. Lost…silent, dreaming. Sealed in, eternal, looking down at the city.

It was one of the best creative events I’ve ever been to.

I would have loved to have spent a week being one of the those angels.

Incidentally paranoia fans, the 16th Floor of the Euston Tower used to host the M15 Communications Centre and a Physical Surveillance Teams (‘Watchers’) base.