London's first high rise building lasted just 100 years - and was dubbed a hideous monstrosity - but it paved the way for modern apartment living.
When it was built in 1873, Queen Anne's Mansions offered a pioneering lifestyle that was the height of comfort and luxury.
The 'French flats' - so named because they were similar to the grand buildings that lined the boulevards of Paris - featured unheard of convenience such as hot and cold running water, hydraulic lifts, and miles of speaker tubes that allowed residents to communicate between apartments.
A communal billiard room, smoking room, and coffee room plus on-site laundry meant it was fully geared up to serve the wealthy Victorian bachelor.
But as Paul Knox explains in his book Lost London (Yale University Press) at an unprecedented 10-storeys The Evening Standard called it "a colossal pile," while architecture historian Nicholas Pevsner dubbed it "an irredeemable horror" and The Times compared it to The Tower of Babel.
Other Londoners complained the building was "ugly", a "monster block" and "a hideous pile of bricks," while one compared it to a factory mill.
Its size - and the circumstances around its construction - spurred legislation to restrict the height of new buildings in London.
But the trailblazing building paved the way for the mansion blocks that sprang up to cater for the city's expanding population.
Demographic changes meant there were more single people or smaller families with fewer servants and a growth in white collar jobs led to a rising middle class who needed to be near City jobs.
Before the expansion of London's suburbs and railways there was a lack of smaller housing in central areas - and the only high rise buildings were tenements for the working classes.
London's first block of flats for the middle classes went up in 1853 on the newly carved out Victoria Street near Westminster.
The fast gentrifying street soon had a group of Parisian-style blocks with shops at ground level and four floors of flats above.
Their popularity and rising rents drew sharp eyed city merchant Henry Hankey who snapped up a site in Petty France near Victoria Street.
He designed the 10-storey, 25-metre high Queen Anne's Mansions himself. It exceeded the permitted limit of a 100 ft high building but he built it anyway and sought retrospective permission from the Metropolitan Board of Works.
Over the next 15 years his extensions infuriated the neighbours pushing the height of a new wing to 11 storeys and 148 feet despite objections and refusal of permission after the fire brigade warned it could not get a jet of water above five storeys.
A magistrate summonsed him for breaches of building codes but it was Queen Victoria herself, who could see the flats from Buckingham Palace and voiced her displeasure along with other prominent critics, who halted Hankey's ambition.
The Secretary of State for War sought an injunction over a new north wing which at 160 feet would overshadow the Guards memorial at the Wellington Barracks and a judge ordered five storeys to be removed from the wing.
In 1890 the new London County Council introduced a law restricting the height of buildings in London to 90 feet - with two additional storeys in the roof space.
By then Queen Anne's Mansions boasted 300 flats with a management office, waste disposal chutes, and letter boxes where you could drop correspondence to the ground floor to be posted.
It was a commercial success, popular among bachelors, spinsters, widows and as a London base for married couples, MPs, retired military types and even a bishop and a Countess.
Charles Dickens himself wrote of Londoners adopting the "continental" or "foreign fashion of living in flats".
The new flats were promoted as an alternative to the suburban villa allowing residents to rent in convenient central London areas at a fraction of the cost of running a house there.
Across Chelsea, Maida Vale, Marylebone, Mayfair and South Kensington, old artisan cottages were razed to make way for the French-style blocks until the 1920s when the rise of the car meant Londoners faced towards the suburbs.
St Anne's Mansions slid down the social scale. The residents were evacuated after it was bombed during the Second World War then requisitioned by the Admiralty and acquired by the Land Security Trust for a new Ministry of Works building.
It was finally demolished in 1973, replaced by the Home Office building that some say is even bigger and uglier than the mansions.
According to Knox, whose book charts the history of London in 25 buildings, the brutalist building designed by Basil Spence "will not be missed when it too is eventually lost".
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