The Oxo Tower

Look up at the tower on the building in front of you. The windows near the top make three shapes, a circle, a cross and another circle. They spell OXO, on all four sides. That's no accident. In the 1920s, the company behind the Oxo stock cube bought an old power station here on the South Bank. It wanted a huge illuminated sign on the top. Permission was refused, because advertising against the skyline was banned along this stretch. So the architect designed windows that just happened to spell out the brand name instead. The rules said nothing about windows. The product had German roots. The chemist Justus von Liebig developed a meat extract in the nineteenth century, and the first Oxo cubes went on sale in 1910, at a penny each. Later the building fell into ruin. By the nineteen seventies it was derelict. In the end, a not-for-profit group run by local people was allowed to buy the land. They restored the building and filled it with cooperative flats, shops and studios for designers. Step into the arcade along the river. It opened in 1988, part of the same rescue. Next stop: Tate Modern, about 600 metres or 8 minutes further along the river, under Blackfriars Bridge.