Description of Sovereign House

Sovereign House was the headquarters of the HMSO (Her Majesty’s Stationery Office) between 1968

and 1996. Sovereign House itself was located at the Anglia Square shopping precinct and was a very

large brutalist office block that employed around 800 people at its peak. Though it might be

surprising to know that even though Sovereign House was specifically built for the HMSO they did

not own the building and in fact leased it from the owners on a 40-year lease, paying £97,000 per

Sovereign House has been abandoned since at least the early 2000s and is in a terrible state of

disrepair and will almost certainly never be occupied again.

The design of Sovereign House

The design of Sovereign House is a brutalist one of glass and concrete

with three wings and two iconic spiral stairways, surrounded with

windows.

Even though Sovereign House is not very tall it looks over the st.

Augustine area of Norwich in an almost oppressive fashion.

What did the HMSO do?

The Her Majesty’s Stationery Office was involved in the publication of

official government documents and associated copyrights, including;

•

Documents related to statutory instruments and laws

•

Girocheques

•

Government Reports

•

Passports

•

The Highway Code

•

The London Gazette

•

Yellow Pages directories

•

And many more.

Until 1980, The HMSO provided free Stationery supplies to the departments of the government and to

parliament.

Construction of Sovereign House (1966 to 1968)

Construction work on Sovereign House would begin in 1966 with the building work being completed

around two years later in 1968.

After Sovereign House was built, workers would start to migrate from London with up to 120

employees moving into the city per month. Paperwork would then be moved to Sovereign House every

Saturday, along with computer equipment.

Sovereign House in its Prime

After opening, Sovereign House would be an extremely busy environment with over 800 employees who

often worked in open planned office spaces and who had plenty of activities to do around the bar

area. As the headquarters Sovereign House was in charge of core operations of the HMSO.

By the mid-1970s, extra space was needed at the building but as plans for an expansion to

Sovereign House on the other side of the ring road were rejected St Crispin’s House would be built

The Decline and closure of Sovereign House

The events that saw the closure of Sovereign House lead back to the early 1980s when budget cuts

to the funding of the HMSO from the organization having to act more like a profit-making business

would see a massive decrease in the amount of support staff that worked between the two HMSO

headquarters (Sovereign House and ST. Crispins House).

Major design flaws would make Sovereign House too expensive to maintain by about 1993 which meant

that it missed out on the refurbishment that ST. Crispins House got in the mid-1990s. Sovereign

House was considered at the time as being “not fit for purpose” which would lead to its closure in

1996.

The Dangerous Decay of Sovereign House

HMSO moved out of Sovereign House in 1996 with the

Cabinet office taking over the lease later that same

year. Looking through some of the related documents, it

becomes obvious that the poor maintenance of Sovereign

House likely started years before the HMSO moved out as

when the Cabinet office took over the lease there was

building. It appears that the hope was that the

landlord would sell Sovereign House so that the

government could take advantage of the terms of their

lease in order to get 50% of the money from that sale

but that would never happen.

Even though the Cabinet office should have been

responsible for the building until 2011 but the utterly

awful condition that Sovereign House was in by the early 2010s would indicate that very little in

the way of maintenance was done in those preceding years. The decay was not only from a lack of

maintenance but also from man-made damage caused by vandalism and police training exercises.

In September 2014, someone working at the building posted a response to a thread on the popular

urbex forum 28 Days Later telling people that they needed to be careful of the asbestos near the

canteen area and to avoid the basement plant room due to the “unstable fire suppression system”.

pictures he took of the roof are of most concern as it reveals the roof is in dreadful condition

with massive cracks running across a large portion of the surface which are so big that plants are

growing within the gaps left by the cracks. This is very bad news for Sovereign House as those

cracks allow rain to enter the interior.

In late 2018, planning permission was granted in order to redevelop the Anglia Square site which

included plans to demolish Sovereign House but as of July 2019, it is still awaiting the outcome

of an inquiry which was launched due to the high number of complaints in relation to the planned

20 story tower.

The Future of Sovereign House

To be blatantly honest there is no future for Sovereign House as the building would be

uneconomical to repair it will never be occupied again even if a company was able to overcome the

ugliness of office block.

For Sovereign House, the only choice is between demolition or just leaving the building in place

to rot away and eventually collapse.