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.

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.

[3] An alike sized space, but a complex hardscaped plaza, stretches to the north west, "St Giles Square", to Tottenham Court Road station.

In 2002, Stanhope and Legal & General appointed the Renzo Piano Building Workshop as architects for an office and residential scheme to replace St Giles Court after its demolition.

[3] Mitsubishi Estate Co. of Japan formed a joint venture with Legal & General in 2007 to fund the estimated £450 million cost of building Central Saint Giles.

[3][10] Legal & General's commission urged Piano to avoid designing a "plain vanilla office building" and called for the new development to be "a fantastic place for people to work".

[17] The courtyard plaza is ringed with eateries and shops, with two oak trees planted in the middle alongside art installations designed by the sculptors Steven Gontarski and Rebecca Warren.

[3][20] The façades facing the inner courtyard are lined with another eight panels covered with grey tiles, a design which project architect Maurits van der Staay says was intended to "ensure that the upper storeys did not detract from the transparency of the ground floor and to maximise the amount of light reflected back into the offices."

Planted roof terraces laid out by the landscape designer Charles Funke are intended to absorb rainfall, thus reducing runoff, and contribute to biodiversity in the area.

A place that, by adding levitated, articulated and colourful buildings, physically expresses the people-focused and socially responsible credentials of modern corporate tenants.

"[10] He has said that his design was intended to fragment the outline of the building to make it less imposing, and that the ceramic façades were inspired by the appearance of brick walls and the cases of guitars and drum kits in music shops in the vicinity.

"[22] The decision to provide a publicly accessible central courtyard was made as a conscious repudiation of the closed architecture of the old St Giles Court, which Piano described as "a kind of fortress.

[17] Ike Ijeh of Building opined that the striking colours of Central Saint Giles provided a "contrast with the traditional London grey/brown of the surrounding townscape [that] is both surreal and cinematic".

He preferred less monotony or predictability to the scheme for the windows but he gave "a resounding and unequivocal yes" to the question of whether the development succeeded, commending it for its "skilful construction of a new urban identity for a forgotten area and the generosity of its ground level engagement with context.

"[20] In Architecture Today, Neven Sidor commended the development's design for "reach[ing] out to its context at the same time as boldly asserting its own personality."

He commented that "somehow colour therapy and fine terracotta modelling make the effect uplifting" and described the vistas from the central plaza as "a joy", praising the skill that had gone into the design.

Piano's standing as an "international star" had, in Sidor's view, given the architect the clout to insist on the development's more unorthodox features and had been essential for such an ambitious complex to receive planning permission in the first place.

He was particularly critical of the way that the colourful upper-floor façades clashed with the use of lines of exposed columns at the ground level and called the site "a grim compromise between two fundamentally opposed ideas of how the capital might develop".