He didn’t have “instincts”, he had thirty years of experience—which was much more reliable. - Ben Aaronovitch

“Shouldn’t I know about these things?” I said.
“The list of things you need to know about, Peter, is extraordinarily long,” said Nightingale.

It’s a bland box of a building built in the 1970s; it was considered to be so lacking in architectural merit that there was talk of listing it so that it could be preserved for posterity as an awful warning.

Old Street roundabout is a diamond-shaped circulatory system designed in the late 1960s to thin out the number of cyclists heading in and out of the City. In line with the then-current planning conventions they added a series of mugger-friendly underpasses, an insufficiently wide entrance to Old Street Underground station, and a small shopping arcade lined with urine-attracting beige tile.…
You can say what you like about late-sixties architecture, but when they baked in the ugly they baked it in good.