This building will be familiar to most people who have spent any time in London.

No. 1 Westminster Bridge is generally regarded as an eyesore from the 1970s which was unpopular when it was built and then fell out of favour at an alarming rate. It was not just the building, but its location on an island totally surrounded by heavy traffic which made it so unfriendly.

Ugly as it may be it is, however, a true landmark in the sense that it can’t be mistaken for anything else, and you can use it to give unequivocal directions. (As in “carry on past the hospital and turn left when you come to the ghastly pentagonal concrete pyramid inthemiddle of the road.”)

But zoom in to the picture and what do you see? Its a countdown to demolition. With such a countdown, we were rather hoping for some sort of explosive event, but having seen here that the demolition will take 20 days I am now not so sure.

Maybe there will be a controlled explosion (implosion) followed by 20 days of carting the debris away, but I am not getting my hopes up. I’m not in London on the day (25th May between 10 & 11am) anyway but I might have been tempted to make a trip in on my day off for something impressive. If I return to work to find that it was blown up I shall be most upset.

The other disappointment is seeing that the old building is to be replaced with an uninspiring glass box which will probably be every bit as unpopular in 30 years’ time.

On the plus side, the countdown is scrolling along, giving days, hours, minutes and seconds to demolition, and I managed to get a decent photo at just the right time so it looks like the sign is saying “4 secs to demolition”. It did take a few attempts to get it just right though.