101 Dalmatians|Minster Court — The Gothic Slab That Played House of DeVil

City workers were calling it Dracula's Castle long before a film crew turned up. Minster Court was completed in 1991 to a design by GMW Partnership: three office blocks in pink-grey granite, gables and pinnacles stacked into something that reads as Gothic from across the street and as pure late-eighties bravado from close up. There is no better address in London for the exterior of a fashion house run by a woman who wants a coat made out of puppies.

Three bronze horses by Althea Wynne rear on the plaza at the Mincing Lane entrance, and Cruella's car pulls in past them. They are the detail most visitors walk by and the one that makes the building findable from the street.

Mincing Lane runs between Fenchurch Street and Great Tower Street, in the stretch of the City that empties out completely at the weekend. That is when to see it. On a Sunday morning the plaza is silent, the granite turns almost purple in low light, and the whole pile stops being an insurance office and looks exactly as absurd and as menacing as the film needed it to be.