13 September 2022 · By Will Ing

Panter Hudspith Architects has resubmitted plans for an 11-storey office block at 74-84 Long Lane in Southwark, south London

The Stirling Prize-shortlisted practice first submitted plans for an 11-storey office on the site in 2019, after Make Architects submitted – but later withdrew – plans for a 15-storey building with 170 co-living homes on the site in 2017.

But Panter Hudspith’s 2019 plans for the site were rejected by the Planning Inspectorate after developer KCN Land appealed Southwark Council’s non-determination of the scheme. The borough later said it would have also rejected the scheme.

Planning inspector Patrick Whelan said he only had one issue with the proposed building: its elevation on Pilgrimage Street. However, he said benefits from the scheme ‘would not outweigh the very significant harm to the spatial character of the area from the design of [this] elevation’.

Whelan said its lack of depth, layering or articulation would make it ‘appear [as] a single monolithic mass’ which would ‘overpower the finer scale of the side street’. He added that it felt ‘divorced from the more dramatic primary layering, movement, and lightness so elegantly articulated in the other elevations of the building.’

Panter Hudspith has said its new scheme ‘has a notably more articulated massing towards the east [fronting Pilgrimage Street] and a refined materials palette’.

The practice has broken up the flatness of the Pilgrimage Street elevation by recessing different parts of the building’s mass to create depth across upper and middle floors, as well as rotating a top volume and adding an entrance to activate the frontage (see diagram below).

It has also introduced a gradient from darker tones at the base of the building to lighter tones at the top to ‘create a stronger variation between the nine volumes that comprise the overall massing’. The colour gradient applies to precast concrete grids in the façade, as well as to masonry infill materials within.

The building would have 4,600m2 of office space across 10 floors, with clear spans created in the separate volumes of the building. Intersections of the blocks have smaller meeting and kitchen spaces. Five floors also have access to south facing terraces, and the design includes a ground-floor hub and café space.

The scheme involves the demolition of a four-storey warehouse-style building on the site. Panter Hudspith described the building as ‘underused and inefficient’ and ‘in a poor condition generally’.

Changes to the Pilgrimage Street elevation 

Pilgrimage Street elevation in Panter Hudspith's 2019 scheme (left) and 2022 scheme

Diagram showing changes to massing in the 2022 scheme - and its effect on Pilgrimage Street elevation

Tags Office Panter Hudspith Planning southwark

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