These are the buildings in contention to be named the UK’s ugliest

Ever built something? A LEGO train? A pillow fort? A treehouse? An actual house? A huge office block? It's pretty easy, right? Just four walls, a floor and a roof. Simple. Hard to get wrong. If I gave you a few hundred bricks, a bag of cement, some YouTube tutorials and left you to it, you could probably bang out a serviceable hotel within a few hours without any training. Imagine if I just asked you to draw a picture of it? You'd do it in seconds. Which makes the nominees for this years Carbuncle Cup - the annual award for Britain's ugliest building - all the more embarrassing.

Real people who are paid real money to design structures dreamt these up, and then received millions for executing them. They had the gall to accept money for doodling these pathetic failures of modern architecture and then forcing builders to make them. Now, many of you probably haven't built your own building before, and neither have I, but we can all agree to have seen one, so let's take a closer look at each of this year's nominees and sneer:

Saffron Square, London

Look at this huge monument to bad taste. It looks like someone's fallen over in the changing rooms of a swimming pool and dashed their head open. If I asked you to build a soulless office block and you handed me the blueprint for this, I'd assume you'd had a nosebleed and couldn't be bothered to start over on a fresh sheet of paper.

Poole Methodist Church Expansion, Poole

If there's one thing that screams 'not incongruous when connected to a Gothic church spires' it's a prefab shelter that looks like it's been transplanted from Miami Beach and hosts Mr Motivator workout sessions on Thursday mornings.

5 Broadgate Lane, London

This building is what happens when you balls things up in Tetris.

The Diamond, University of Sheffield

This is concept fan-art for some armour that a character in a terrible RPG game would wear. It's also a place of learning. With any luck not about architecture.

One Smithfield, Stoke-On-Trent

Where would you rather look? At this epilepsy-inducing dismembered Rubik's Cube, or the mound of debris and scorched earth underneath it? It's a genuinely quite difficult decision.

Lincoln Plaza, London

I actually quite like this one. Sorry 'Carbuncle Cup', but you've made a horrible mistake including this Actually Good feat of great building in your list of awful eyesores. It looks like one of those gravity defying Escher staircases, with little ledges to leap across if you were scaling it for some reason (e.g. to make a parkour video or fool a terrorist plot at the top.)