Griffin Place

About

Roche Products Factory (also known as the Roche Building or by its later residential name, Griffin Place) is a former pharmaceutical company headquarters and factory at 40 Broadwater Road, Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire, England. It was built in 1938 as the British headquarters, laboratories and factory of Roche Products Limited, the British subsidiary of the Swiss pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-La Roche, and was designed by the Swiss architect Otto Rudolf Salvisberg of Zurich, in association with C. Stanley Brown. It is the only building by Salvisberg in the United Kingdom.

The building was named "Building of the Year" by The Architects' Journal in its issue of 19 January 1939, in a notice by Professor Reilley, who called it the pinnacle of functional, modern architecture. It became a popular destination for visiting architects from Britain and abroad. It has been a Grade II listed building since 1980. After Roche vacated the site in 2005, the original 1938 administration and factory block stood empty for around a decade before being converted into 34 apartments, completed in 2019 under the development name Griffin Place.