History has been made in England, where the Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners-designed Sainsbury complex in London has become the country's first historically-recognized supermarket. 

Built between 1986 and 1988, the muscular complex is designed in the High-Tech style of the time, a mode that combines technological advances in industrial materiality with the formal and structural clarity of Brutalism to create a particularly expressive variant of late modern architecture. The complex was developed by the Sainsbury grocery chain as a mixed-use project that matches a sizable supermarket with a group of row houses and apartments. Both buildings have been recognized as having Grade II significance, the country's third-highest level of significance. 

The long, rectangular supermarket is articulated as a series of bays framed by massive structural steel members. The steel, coated in a fire-proof paint typically used for military application that allows the elements to be left exposed, is matched along this evocative exterior by repeating aluminum facade panels and spartan windows. One end of the supermarket is capped by an archetypal, metal-wrapped staircase, while the long exposure of the building is supported by an arcade made up of delicate steel column assemblies. 

The pod-shaped town houses, known as 1-12 Grand Union Walk, are designed to match the supermarket building. The canal-facing units are arranged as a row of repeating L-shaped homes, and feature larger, vertically-stacked, pill-shaped versions of the windows that appear on the supermarket. The homes represent a rare example of residential High-Tech architecture and are described in an announcement as "a particularly striking and creative example of modern terraced housing" by Historic England, the country's official preservation and heritage body. 

Announcing the designation, Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, said, "The Camden Road Sainsbury’s is an outstanding example of High-Tech architecture in a busy urban setting. It is an unapologetically futuristic building which also sits comfortably alongside its historic neighbors–matching the scale of the 19th-century terrace opposite–and rightly deserves to be recognized for its architectural significance."