With the topping out of 2 Finsbury Avenue at the end of January and the opening of the shopping mall Broadgate Central a couple of months earlier, the shape of British Land’s redeveloped Broadgate is all but complete.

The 36-storey 2 Finsbury Avenue towers above the rest of the development with its angular, snazzy gold cladding typifying the architecture of the all-new scheme. The uniform pink granite of the Peter Foggo-designed original buildings has been banished in favour of a cacophony of gold, raw stainless steel, bright reds and high tech black.

This horrified conservationists, who tried and failed to get the whole scheme listed. Historic England recommended that the first four phases be listed grade II* in 2011, which would have placed Broadgate in the same company as the National Theatre and Battersea Power Station. The heritage body described the development as a critically acclaimed, exemplar of urban place making that was a benchmark for later 20th-century urbanism of this scale.