Winston Smith walked through the glass doors of Victory Mansions. The hallway
smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of
it it acoloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked
to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a
metre wide. Winston made for the stairs.

Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of
figures which had something to do with pig-iron. Winston turned a switch
and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. He
moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of
his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform
of the party.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though,
as he well knew, even a back can be revealing. A kilometre
away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered vast and
white above the grimy landscape. Winston tried to squeeze out some childhood
memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like
this.

The Ministry of Truth--Minitrue, in Newspeak [Newspeak was the officiallanguage of Oceania]--was
startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous
pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring 300 metres into the air.