Creating Spaces: 1 New Street Square

As part of the Creating Spaces programme, our new HQ at 1 New Street Square now forms the central hub of our new campus. There were five key principles that guided the design of 1NSS. Our space needed to be unique, connected, simple, relevant and inspiring. We needed an environment that better met the evolving and diverse needs of our people and clients. We’ve done this by providing more suitable, varied and flexible space to drive new ways of working whilst reflecting our capacity constraints and maximising efficiency and choice. From connecting us together; to enhancing our wellbeing, inspiring our people and welcoming our clients; our new workplace has reinvented the way we work.

Our sustainability strategy was to challenge traditional ‘green building’ thinking and deliver a workplace that would truly benefit our people and the planet. By putting these considerations at the heart of our workplace vision, our fit-out attained both BREEAM Outstanding certification – a globally recognised method for assessing environmental design – and with a score of 94%, became the highest scoring BREEAM 2014 Refurbishment & Fit-out project in the world at time of occupation; and WELL Certified™ Gold – a prestigious distinction awarded to workplaces that are designed and operated to enhance people’s health and wellbeing. In doing so, we also became the largest WELL Certified™ Gold for ‘New and Existing Interiors’ project in the world and the first to achieve BREEAM Outstanding/ WELL Gold dual-certification.

Our key findings

• In our old environment 45% of offices and 30% of desks were unused at any one time 
• Engagement with our workforce (67% of which are millennial, with an average age of 32), told us that we were not providing the right space to enable them to do their best work 

Our new London campus

• Our new working environment meets the evolving needs of our growing business. Since 2014, we have: 
• Accommodated 30% more people, working in 3% less space 
• Reduced on-floor storage by more than 60% 
• Removed individual allocation of partner offices, offering instead a far greater range of formal and informal work settings . 

1 New Street Square overview

The building comprises of 15 floors spread across 280,000 sq ft

We have…

• 5,500 people sharing 3,500 working positions comprising of 2,000 core positions vs. 1,500 flex positions 
• 8 working floors allocated to business units, 2 shared floors with unallocated workspace available to anyone in our business to use 
• 10 client environment choices co-located in one building e.g. client meeting rooms, event spaces such as The Greenhouse, The Orchard, The Observatory and The Academy plus a choice of dining options

We’ve built flexibility into 1NSS, which will enable us to continue to adapt as we learn. The workplace principles and policies that we’ve embedded enable us to be flexible about how we use their spaces and engaging with the business more regularly will help us to understand our people’s workplace requirements. Our Intelligent Building approach also provides us with a wealth of data around utilisation and environmental conditions, ensuring we understand the use of our space better than ever before.