Central Saint Giles is a mixed-use development in central London. Built at a cost of £450 million and completed in May 2010, it was designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano and is his first work in the UK. The development consists of two buildings of up to 15 storeys in height, arranged around a public courtyard lined with shops and restaurants. It is chiefly notable for its façades, covered with 134,000 glazed tiles in vivid shades: orange, red, lime green and a warm yellow. It has attracted a number of high-profile tenants including NBCUniversal, MindShare, and Google. In January 2022, Google announced plans to purchase the entire building for $1 billion USD. Location and background The development is in the district of St Giles, one block south-east of the east end of Oxford Street. The area was once notorious for being one of the worst slums in London, known as the Rookery – a maze of ramshackle houses, alleys and courtyards inhabited by thousands of destitute people. It was famously depicted by William Hogarth in his 1751 print Gin Lane. Central Saint Giles stands on the site of St Giles Court, an office development erected in the 1950s for the Ministry of Supply and latterly used by the Ministry of Defence (MOD). It consisted of a linked series of brick blocks, six to eight storeys high, arranged in an S-shape around two courtyards to which there was no public access. The grim appearance contributed to the area becoming a magnet for prostitutes and the homeless. The building was owned by Legal & General but was occupied by the MOD on a lease not due to expire until 2011. At the start of the 21st century the MOD made a large consolidation of offices so discontinued the use of several in the capital, including St Giles Court. It vacated the building in April 2005. The site, a modest urban block, covers bounded by shortened (by pedestrianisation) St Giles High Street, as well as by Earnshall, Bucknall and Dyott Streets and a brief frontage to Shaftesbury Avenue. Partly bounding the north is the 1960s Centre Point tower on New Oxford Street. To the south-west are the 18th-century church of St Giles-in-the-Fields and its churchyard, playground and public gardens forming the block's wholly pedestrianised link to Shaftesbury Avenue. An alike sized space, but a complex hardscaped plaza, stretches to the north west,