Civil servants have returned to work at the refurbished Ministry of Defence building on Whitehall this week. The gigantic stone structure, which looms over Inigo Jones' ornate Banqueting House, has been completely refurbished at a cost of ￡352m by a PFI consortium that includes Skanska as main contractor and HOK as architect. Like other Whitehall ministries that have undergone refurbishment in recent years, such as the Treasury, the MoD building is a classical stone building and is grade I listed. The difference is that the MoD building is only 55 years old and is as architecturally undistinguished as it is huge - the architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner dismissed it as "a monument of tiredness". Even so, its listed status has ensured that there is no external sign of the transformation other than stone cleaning.
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