The Economist Group

Workplace

⥤ Overview

The design of a 25,000 sq ft space on the 4th floor of the Adelphi Building on London’s John Adam Street for The Economist Group, enabling all the group’s London staff to be integrated into the same office for the first time in several years. Whilst The Economist newspaper’s editorial team moved to the John Adam Street building five years ago, its commercial teams and the group’s other businesses - around 530 people in total – had continued to be housed in separate offices in Canary Wharf.            

⥤ Brief

The opportunity to integrate the two teams came about partly because of the pandemic - and subsequent openness to new and different ways of working - and partly because the previous tenant of the 4th floor space moved out. The brief was for minimum intervention with maximum impact and to make the integration an exemplar scheme in terms of re-engineering and circularity, with the embodied carbon on the project reduced by a massive 82% finally, when compared to a traditional procurement route.

⥤ Challenges

The main potential issue was that the new floorplate at the Adelphi Building was almost 20,000 sq ft less than the existing Canary Wharf offices. A period of concentrated consultation and testing followed to ensure the new office would accommodate a hybrid working scenario. A major logistical challenge was the huge inventory of inherited furniture from both the previous offices and the previous tenant, who’d left all furniture and desking in situ. There was scope for new furniture, but only if it worked functionally, or could not be made to work with re-upholstery, whilst the entirety also had to work aesthetically within its 4th floor parameters and with the existing Economist Group editorial offices.