Economist Plaza, St James's Street, SW1

On the east side of St James's Street, immediately north of Ryder Street, is Economist Plaza, a hidden courtyard housing the tower block of The Economist magazine offices, which featured in two iconic scenes of Sixties cinema. The courtyard appears deceptively large, as the creepily silent white-face students career around the tiny space in a truck at the beginning of Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 Blowup.

In Michael Winner’s 1967 satire I’ll Never Forget What’s’is Name, advertising exec Quint (Oliver Reed) famously quits the rat race by taking an axe to his desk. The office of Orson Welles’s ‘Lute Corporation’, where Reed acts out the fantasy of every disenchanted office worker, is the Economist Building, 25 St James’s Street.

Blowup (1966, dir: Michelangelo Antonioni)
I’ll Never Forget What’s’is Name (1967, dir: Michael Winner)