Coal Drops Yard
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Heatherwick Studio’s Coal Drops Yard scheme in King’s Cross converts listed industrial warehouses to retail and public realm uses with a flourish.
The project consists of two elongated Victorian warehouses, converted into a high-end shopping centre and connected via a dramatic curved roof, which lifts up and away from the brick footprint to a mid-air meeting point.
This flourish responds to the restraints imposed by the site itself; the listed coal drops warehouses sit roughly parallel, with a north-south orientation, and at the widest point there is 39m between them. This means a substantial portion of the project is taken up by open space that needed to be activated and connected to its surroundings.
The inward-facing archways of the two buildings provide retail units of approximately 100-200m2, with slight variations in shop front design, while a lower-ground section built beneath Stable Street contains a number of smaller units for pop-up stores. Here the tight scale of the street and articulated shop fronts give a more intimate feel, not dissimilar to Camden’s Stables Market in massing and materiality.
The grand formal statement of the project is the ‘peel’ of the roof, as it is referred to by project architect Tamsin Green. Designed to create a distinctive, even iconic moment, the ‘peel’ also establishes a strong visual connection between the parallel structures. Slate roof tiles, replaced by Heatherwick but sourced from the same quarry as their Victorian predecessors on the coal drops, run straight along the line of the building until they lift off and curve inwards to touch briefly in the centre before settling back in their gabled form on the north end.
Aiming to avoid unnecessary disruption to the Victorian warehouses, the peeled roof sits independently on new steel columns, which have been threaded through the brick structure and are occasionally visible in the new shop interiors.
The horizontal truss that holds up the ‘peel’ itself also carries the flagship retail unit, a 1,864m2 space with structural glazing on both sides and a generous skylight.
The new façade to the upper level is a serrated structural glass system. By effectively folding the façade it becomes self-supporting without the need for any additional framing.
Data
- Begun: 2016
- Completed: Oct 2018
- Floor area: 9,300m2
- Sectors: Retail, Public realm
- CO2 Emissions: 60.5kg/m2/year
- Address: Stable Street, London, N1C 4DQ, United Kingdom
Professional Team
- Architect: Heatherwick Studio
- Project architect: Thomas Heatherwick
- Client: Argent
- Lead designer: Heatherwick Studio
- Delivery Architect: BAM Design
- Structural/façade engineer: Arup
- M&E/sustainability: Hoare Lee
- QS/Project manager: Gardiner & Theobald
- CDM co-ordinator : BCAL Consulting
- Approved building inspector : Camden Council
- Main contractor: BAM
- CAD software used: Rhino, Revit, Grasshopper, AutoCAD
- Heritage consultant: Giles Quarme & Associates
- Lighting: Speirs + Major
- Wayfinding: Holmes Wood
- Developer: KCCLP/Argent
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