London Wall Place – a joint venture development between Brookfield Properties and Oxford Properties – is a new destination in the City of London. The client’s ambition was for a premium, architecturally outstanding commercial campus. At full capacity, the campus needed to host 5,000 employees.

Unusually for a commercial development in the City, Make proposed to create public gardens encapsulating Roman and medieval ruins, into which two visually similar but geometrically different office and retail buildings were placed. The design thus exceeded the commercial brief by offering a large area of public realm with user wellbeing as its focus.

The new 1-acre public park is formed of a series of terraced pocket gardens that, together with the adjacent Salters’ Hall Garden and nearly-complete St Alphage Gardens, will deliver over 1.5 acres of public space and over 780m2 of green walls. Included in this vertical landscape are the hugely popular ‘highwalks’ – a reminder of the previous 1960s site – extending to 350m in length and housing a new raised garden. Thousands of plants, including strawberries, lavender and ivy, are distributed to suit various microclimates within the site

The two buildings share the same striking appearance, clad in elegant bands of light concrete and dark blue ceramic. 1 London Wall Place, the new headquarters for global asset managers Schroders, provides 310,000ft2 of space over 13 floors and 9 roof terraces. The building’s staggered form offers a wide variety of floorplates. 2 London Wall Place is a 17-storey, multi-let building with two floorplate typologies, allowing maximum flexibility to tenants.

The scheme was delivered over four years in one continuous phase including demolition, construction and fit-out. The development stimulated inward investment to the surrounding area, including the refurbishment of Salters’ Hall, which changed its address to 4 London Wall Place; the conversion of the adjacent Roman House from office to residential accommodation; and the enhancement of the City-owned highways and highwalks, including the enhancement of St Alphage Gardens as an extension of the development. Each of these developments was progressed in collaboration with the designers of each asset to ensure a harmonious, consolidated neighbourhood re-energising this previously isolated City outpost.

With half the site dedicated to public realm, London Wall Place delivers the largest set of public gardens to the City since the Barbican, representing a new breed of office developments where the wider community is central to the design.