Amex House

Amex House, popularly nicknamed The Wedding Cake, was the former European headquarters of American Express, the multinational financial services company. Its site is located in the Carlton Hill area of Brighton, part of the English city of Brighton and Hove. The nine-floor building, designed by British architecture firm Gollins, Melvin, Ward & Partners, was commissioned by the company in 1977 to consolidate their operations in Brighton, which had been spread over several sites. The white and blue structure, a landmark on the city skyline, received both praise and criticism for its distinctive style. Demolition work began in April 2016 after the completion of a new headquarters building on land owned by American Express adjacent to the site. In October 2017 demolition was completed and the site was sold to First Base and Patron Capital, a pan-European institutional investor focused on property backed investments who proposed "a vibrant new mixed-use development including new homes, workspace and importantly, new jobs to revive this area of Brighton" .

Brighton grew rapidly in the 18th and 19th centuries, prompted by its development into a fashionable seaside resort. New residential areas were developed around the core of the old fishing village of Brighthelmston. Rich visitors and residents were housed in set-piece Regency squares and terraces on the seafront, but the large number of poor people attracted to the town from across Sussex and beyond by the prospect of work lived in the smaller terraced streets of new suburbs on the surrounding hillsides. One of these—and the most poverty-stricken and densely populated—was Carlton Hill, an area east of Old Steine and the Royal Pavilion and separated from the higher-class seafront development by Edward Street. This road, leading east towards Kemp Town and Black Rock, was a major shopping area in the 19th and early 20th centuries, but the area declined after World War II and much of the northern side was cleared between the 1950s and the 1970s. Road widening took up some of the released land, but large areas were still available for redevelopment in the 1960s and 1970s.

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