The world-famous Old Lady of Threadneedle street is subject of an extensive yet sensitive internal renewal that will enhance the working environment for its 1200 London-based staff.
The aim of the project, which has been designed by architects Sheperd Robson, is to consolidate staff back into the main building form a total of four facilities into which they have spread around the City of London over the years. With only 15 months available between commencement of planning and move-in, it was a fast-track project in which all contributors had to perform for it to succeed.
The project originated in 1999. Part of the impulse for change came from a desire to move to open-plan environment. At the same time, from the property services point of view there was a need to contain and reduce the cost of churn with the amount of internal reorganisation that was taking place.
With staff using a multitude of small 4-person offices, often with fixed desk locations because of hard-wired services, this meant a continual building of new partitions, often finding that furniture was no longer suitable for new locations. A master plan was drawn up, one of the aims of which was to drive down the cost of churn by moving to an open plan area with a raised floor, together with greatly improved lighting and air quality, and improved communication between staff.
Paper storage was kept low to maintain eye contact, and low screening between the Abak desks means that each user’s area is defined and enclosed, but they can easily see their colleagues by raising their heads. ‘This will aid the feeling within a division that people are working with everyone on the team, rather than simply the four people that happened to be in an enclosed office,’ says Gerald Pelham, Senior Project Manager at the Bank, who had overall responsibility for the refurbishment ‘and hopefully with the new configuration we can ensure that in the future it will be the people that move and not the furniture.’
In selecting their suppliers for the project the Bank went through the EU tendering procedure, which for the furniture produced hundreds of responses - the greatest number of all packages that were advertised.
Each of the Abak desks has 4-6 power sockets and 6 data points within it, delivered via umbilical channels from the floor boxes. The Bank’s IT department reviewed each of the competitors at final selection stage. ‘In a sense the wire management has become easier than it was at one time,’ comments Pelham ‘Nowadays the issue is really more of keeping it tidy rather than keeping it all rigidly separate.’
‘The end of projects are always fraught,’ says Pelham a week before his users were due to move in, ‘but this has been a good one to work on and we have achieved what we needed to and hopefully provided a very satisfactory working environment. Reaction to the new environment has been very positive, though we joke amongst ourselves that despite all the work that goes into it, for many of the users the only important things will be the PC and the desk they sit at...’
