Case Study

Guardian Live, London

The Guardian is a newspaper with its roots in collective activism and an articulate and digitally engaged readership increasingly interested in its own-run courses, activities, events and seminars. When a dilapidated Victorian train shed just a stone's throw from its current King's Cross HQ became available, the paper saw a golden opportunity to create an evolutionary new cultural, arts and education hub with a ready-made membership.

Architect firm Bennetts Associates was charged with transforming the 7,600 sq m Midlands Goods Shed. The Guardian Live entity will occupy about half of the building, with the other half occupied by Waitrose. The Guardian's director of the project, Jonathan Robinson, says: 'It is a civic space that combines the best bits of a global media organisation with the conviviality of a coffee house and content generated both by our audience and our community, but also by our partner institutions.'

The programme's content is eclectic, curating contributions from its near neighbours Central St Martins, SOAS, Birkbeck, British Library and the Google campus, among others. Around 5,000 Guardian Live events a year are planned, not just in London but all over the UK, New York and Delhi.

Bennetts Associates' director Julian Lipscombe says: 'We've taken an extraordinary base building and added some very refined, elegant and exciting new pieces of construction.

The spaces are impressive in scale but one also needs to be able to achieve an intimacy within it, delivering for a whole variety of types of scales of event.'

Client: Guardian Media Group
Architect: Bennetts Associates
Area: Around 3,600 sq m
Completion: Scheduled for 2016