Floral Street, Covent Garden

This project encompasses an island site in Covent Garden, bordered by Floral Street, Hanover Place, Long Acre and Bow Street. The site contains eight buildings, including two listed buildings, and at the centre lies a landlocked building with difficult access off an alleyway. These buildings are all interconnecting in some way, and the design involved developing an integrated fire strategy for the entire site. Two of the buildings were refurbished to provide small-scale residential units and the remaining buildings were redeveloped to achieve increased or more efficient office space. 

The client, Royal London Asset Management, owns all the buildings in the site, with the exception of a public house on the corner of Bow Street and Long Acre.

In order to achieve the increased office areas Royal London purchased an additional property on the corner of Bow Street and Broad Court, 20 Bow Street, with the specific intention of creating residential units in the building, in order to match the balance of planning uses.

The challenge of the project was to maximise the potential of each of these individual and quite different buildings, in a sensitive way. The building types varied from small domestic-scale terraced houses to large purpose-built warehouses, formerly used for potato storage in the period when Covent Garden was a fruit and vegetable market.