Terry Farrell, who has died aged 87, was one of the most conspicuous figures in British postmodernism – a designer unafraid of spectacle, contradiction and unapologetic play. His architecture, always charged with theatre, remains among the most recognisable interventions in London’s late-20th-century landscape. Few pass along the Thames without registering his most famous work, the headquarters of the Secret Intelligence Service at Vauxhall. This building married Cold War gravitas with the glint of cinematic fiction.
Completed in 1994, the MI6 headquarters captured Farrell in full stride. The building was piled up with layers of stepped terraces, ziggurats, crenellations, and coloured stone in a composition that seemed both fortress and stage set. Critics lined up with competing interpretations. Deyan Sudjic judged it an “epitaph for the architecture of the 1980s”, something that could be read as equally Mayan or Art Deco. Others, less forgiving, dismissed it as “Ceaușescu Towers”. Yet the building’s cultural afterlife, immortalised and destroyed on screen in the James Bond franchise, underlined precisely what Farrell understood: architecture could be both a civic gesture and an act of storytelling.
Farrell’s instinct for the dramatic was visible across London. At Embankment Place (1990), he suspended an office block over Charing Cross Station, its façade recalling the gleaming façade of a cinema organ. At Alban Gate (1987) on London Wall, bands of glass and pink granite wrapped a monumental tower that spanned the road like a ceremonial arch, a sugar-striped companion to the grey weight of the Barbican.
For TV-am’s Camden studios (1983), Farrell reworked a disused car showroom into a set-piece for the nation’s new breakfast slot, finishing it with oversized egg-cup finials in yellow and blue. Years after the channel folded, one of those playful ornaments reappeared on the Antiques Roadshow—a wry afterlife that underscored his ease with popular imagery.
Born in Sale, Greater Manchester, in 1938, Farrell moved to Newcastle as a child, where he studied architecture before receiving a scholarship to study abroad. A close working partnership with Nicholas Grimshaw marked his early years. Together they produced sleek, high-tech work before their approaches diverged – Grimshaw towards the rationalist, Farrell towards the eclectic. By 1980, Farrell had established his own practice. The moment coincided with the rise of postmodern theory in Britain, shaped above all by Charles Jencks, with whom Farrell worked closely. Their collaboration on Jencks’s Cosmic House in Holland Park (1978–83) produced a residence that became the definitive built manifesto of the movement – layered with symbolism, delight and provocation. In 2018, the house became the first post-war private dwelling to be listed Grade I, enshrining its place in architectural history.
The flair of Farrell’s surfaces and motifs sometimes provoked unease. To his critics, his buildings were accused of courting frivolity. Farrell countered that his concern was to restore communication between the building and the public, to make architecture less mute, more legible, and more open to pleasure. It was an argument he pressed with conviction, and by the 1990s, his practice had grown into one of the largest British firms operating abroad.
Farrell’s ties to Asia were long-standing. His first encounter with Hong Kong in 1964, on a scholarship, left a lasting impression. Decades later, his practice won the competition for the Peak Tower (1997), a bowl-shaped lookout that became a postcard emblem of the city, even appearing on the twenty-dollar banknote. Later came Shenzhen’s KK100 (2012), a soaring 442-metre skyscraper that, at the time of its completion, was the tallest building by a British architect. Farrell relished these international commissions, which confirmed that postmodern flamboyance could travel, and that British designers could still leave a mark on Asia’s rapidly expanding skylines.
His portfolio was extensive. He delivered civic masterplans as well as one-off landmarks, and he occasionally strayed into unexpected territory. The Deep, a vast aquarium in Hull (2002), brought him widespread acclaim in the north, to the point that a Class 222 train was christened “Sir Terry Farrell” in tribute.
In London, his office was located in a former aircraft factory off Edgware Road, a building that had once been responsible for producing Spitfires. The site became a microcosm of Farrell’s world: industrial structure enlivened by Deco ornament. For more than two decades, he lived above the practice in a penthouse crammed with model aircraft and ornamental pools filled with koi. Visitors entering this theatrical space were confronted with the same sense of play and provocation that defined his public works.
In later years, Farrell turned back towards Newcastle, reconnecting with his early landscape. He designed the Centre for Life and contributed masterplans for the University and Quayside. Most significantly, he spearheaded the creation of the Farrell Centre, which opened in 2023 in the city’s Victorian Claremont Buildings. Conceived as an “urban room”, the centre embodies his conviction that every city deserves a place where citizens can directly engage with architecture, planning and urban change. It was a fitting legacy for an architect who believed that design should be as much about public dialogue as it is about professional expertise.
Although his career ran parallel to the decline of modernism, Farrell did not set himself in outright opposition. Instead, he absorbed its lessons in functionality and engineering and grafted onto them a language of humour, memory and excess. His practice demonstrated that architecture could be learned but also loved, that it could draw from history without retreating into pastiche, and that spectacle could be a valid cultural contribution rather than an embarrassment.
The sheer visibility of his work ensured he was never far from controversy, but he seemed to welcome that. “If architecture doesn’t get noticed,” he once remarked, “what’s the point?” With Farrell, notice was guaranteed. From Thames-side citadels to skyline-piercing towers, from egg cups in Camden to a fish-shaped aquarium in Hull, his buildings insist on being seen – and remembered.
Terry Farrell, born 1938, died 2025.
Top Photo: Terry Farrell / Alan Williams Creative Commons Attribution 3.0