8 Bleeding heart yard

One previous building owners and two previous architects could not gain planning approval for its renovation and extension. Groupwork gained extensions to the side and upward, doubling the client’s net lettable area. Using historical surveys the eight buildings spanning 350years that had been demolished in the late 1960’s to make way for a single office building, were 3D mapped across the site. Revealing building lines, heights and streetscape that could be ‘remembered or misremembered’ and raise questions on material use to express that theme. Prior to design development, three rounds of community consultation were undertaken presenting and discussing the long history of Bleeding Heart Yard and Hatton Garden, originally named the gardens to the Bishop of Ely. Resulting in focused debates around nostalgia and false and idealised narratives of the past and the wish to remember and express a critical perspective. The 1960’s building demolished intact shopfronts on Greville Street and the coherent north east corner of Bleeding Heart Yard. The blank brick wall on Greville Street was removed and replaced with glazed shopfronts, the façade on Bleeding Heart Yard restored but including a double storey public colonnade for shelter from sun and rain. Only ground level brick walls, aluminium windows, internal fit-out and later partitions were removed. The interior cleaned, new wc and kitchenettes added with new air source heat pumps for heating and hot water. A heavy overcoat of insulation on the retained brick walls and new CLT/glulam extensions. All of which too the walls to the limit of the site boundary allowing for millimetres of perforated sheet to express what had once been on the site. The combination having negative embodied carbon when sequestrating timber is accounted.