The Provisional IRA  bombed the City of London  in 1992, causing £800m in damages.  The bomb was centered (51.5144,-0.081) on St. Mary’s Axe, a small street off of Threadneedle.  The street’s name is a conflation of St. Mary’s Parish and a pub that used to have an axe as its symbol.  Very English.  Pronounced Simmery’s Axe, supposedly.

The bomb damaged the Baltic Exchange, a shipping stock market of sorts, based on a coffee shop formerly named The Virginia and Baltick.  At least one exchange employee (there were only 20 in all) was killed in the attack.  The exchange is famous — well somewhat famous in certain circles — for publishing the Baltic Index, a measure of shipping prices around the world that is seen by finance nerds as a good leading indicator of economic activity since there isn’t any speculative action in the index (i.e., it’s all real prices by real players in the wet market as it were) and because it forecasts how much demand there is for moving raw materials which then get turned into food and computers and so on in the future.  Anyway.

The exchange couldn’t afford to restore the damage, so their historic building was dismantled and sold to Dennis Buggins, famous for the NY antique furniture scandal (with the brother of the guy from the previous antique furniture scandal, John and Carlton Hobbs).  Buggins has it listed on his website but other reports say it was bought by an Estonian and was supposed to be set up — delicious irony this — as the Tallin Stock Market.  Baltics and all that, see?  But it doesn’t look like that’s happened.

The demolished building was replaced by Sir Norman Foster’s so-called Gherkin whose official name is “30 St. Mary’s Axe.”  Foster, who among other masterpieces designed the HSBC headquarters in Hong Kong which I think is the most beautiful office building in the world, created the Gherkin as a 600-foot approximation of a zonohedra:

A zonohedron is a convex polyhedron where every face is a polygon with point symmetry or, equivalently, symmetry under rotations through 180°. Any zonohedron may equivalently be described as the Minkowski sum of a set of line segments in three-dimensional space, or as the three-dimensional projection of a hypercube. Zonohedra were originally defined and studied by E. S. Fedorov, a Russian crystallographer. More generally, in any dimension, the Minkowski sum of line segments forms a polytope known as a zonotope. (Wikipedia)

That’s what terrorism gets you.