Ten British buildings worthy of Thunderbirds

Gerry and Sylvia Anderson always showed a keen eye for exciting modern architecture in their many hit 1960s TV series. Thunderbirds featured Tracy Island, the home so cool that decades later kids were still going nuts for models of it on Blue Peter. But Britain has a good number of modern buildings every bit as exciting and outrageous as their cardboard counterparts. Here's ten of them.

1. Forton Services. Pennine Tower at Lancaster services on the M6, designed by T. P. Bennett and Son, opened 1966. The super-cool hexagonal tower was once a restaurant but is now for the most part abandoned.

British Gas Engineering Research Station (1967), Killingworth - See more at: http://www.odechair.com/ode/ode/blog_files/Ryder_and_Yates_Classic_Images.html#sthash.Kx4M3hmU.dpuf

British Gas Engineering Research Station (1967), Killingworth - See more at: http://www.odechair.com/ode/ode/blog_files/Ryder_and_Yates_Classic_Images.html#sthash.Kx4M3hmU.dpuf

British Gas Engineering Research Station (1967), Killingworth - See more at: http://www.odechair.com/ode/ode/blog_files/Ryder_and_Yates_Classic_Images.html#sthash.Kx4M3hmU.dpuf

2. British Gas Engineering Research Station: Killingworth, opened 1967, designed by Ryder and Yates, a vast industrial building that seems to be trumpeting to the stars.

3. Friar's Square Wimpy: Part of Aylesbury's now demolished Friar's Square shopping centre, designed by Bernard Engle, 1962, this would be considered 'googie' architecture if it were American - a style of kitsch modernism epitomised by atomic age roadside diners and motels.

4. Radio City Tower: Built as a ventilation chimney for St. John's Market, Liverpool, designed by Weightman & Bullen and opened in 1969, St. John's Beacon (as it was) once contained a revolving restaurant but is now home to Radio City radio station, among others.

5. Tolworth Tower: Designed by George Marsh at Richard Seifert for developer Harry Hyams, this 1963 rocket-trail whoosh of a skyscraper towers over Kingston-Upon-Thames.

6. Welbeck Street Car Park: Right in the centre of London sits this trinket box turned space freighter of a car park, designed for Debenhams on Oxford Street in 1971 by Michael R. Blampied & Partners.

7. Usk Street flats: Denys Lasdun's 1954 flats in Usk Street, Bethnal Green, part of his 'cluster block' experiment, have something of the limbs of an orbiting space station about them.

8. Engineering Building, Leicester University: Stirling and Gowan's audacious 1963 building for Leicester University is part rocket launcher, part lunar module.

9. Space House: Another Marsh/Seifert/Hyams job, Space House on Kingsway in London was opened in 1966, a great circular drum of a building, ready to be hauled to the stars beneath Thunderbird 2.

10. The Post Office Tower: The ultimate in British sci-fi architecture, star of Doctor Who and Dan Dare. Eric Bedford from the Ministry of Works designed this beauty in the early 60s, its entire function to be tall enough to beam TV signal microwaves over the heads of other buildings and hills to relay stations round the country. It's not so much a Thunderbirds building, more a rocket ship in its own right.