Inside Google’s 1-Million-Square-Foot London Office — 3 Years Before It Opens

What's This?

Leo Mirani for Quartz 2013-11-02 03:30:47 UTC

Google’s new London office, scheduled to open in 2016, will have an open-air swimming pool, an indoor football pitch, a climbing wall and a roof garden from which to watch trains glide out of Kings Cross station toward Cambridge or Hogwarts. Googlers can cycle right into the building and to the cycle store room, which is equipped with showers and lockers. Somewhere in the interstices, there will also be desks to work at.

View of St Pancras. INK/Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

The 1-million-sqare-foot office will sit on 2.4 acres of land between Kings Cross and St. Pancras stations. When the deal was announced in January, it was one of the biggest commercial property acquisitions in Britain. Reuters reports Google will spend £650 million ($1.05 billion) to buy and develop the site, with an eventual worth of £1 billion.

The 2.4 acre site sits between Kings Cross station (top), St Pancras Station (bottom) and Central Saint Martins art school (left). Rob Parrish/Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

So why is Google splashing the cash on this much space? The cynical answer is because it can: Google needs to do something with all those billions of dollars it has earned outside the U.S. because it can’t bring them home without a whopper of a tax bill. The more philosophical answer is that the nature of work is changing — at least for those companies that can afford it.

Interior offices. INK/Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

Conventional wisdom has it that technology has made offices leaner. Manual labor has been eliminated, paper files have been replaced by digital ones, and people can work remotely. Yet that is precisely why Google needs as much space as it does — the swimming pool, the football pitch and the free lunches are meant to entice workers into the office, to keep them there, to eliminate reasons for staying away. Tech companies take as much space as old economy firms — they just use it differently.

Googlers can cycle right into the building to the 20,000-square-foot bike shed. INK/Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

“The idea is that the people who are in the building — not the tenant but the actual staff — need to be attracted to the building. They need to like the community of the building,” says Simon Allford of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, the London architects building Google’s HQ.

Parts of the office, such as the promenade running through the building, will be open to the public. INK/Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

That’s also why Google chose to put its building at Kings Cross. Central Saint Martins, an art school, is just over the canal. The Francis Crick Institute, a biomedical research center, is coming there in 2015. The British Library, home to one of the world’s largest collections of knowledge, is up the road. And Googlers with a decent pair of binoculars should be able to read tomorrow’s news being typed out at the Guardian ’s offices on the other side of Kings Cross. When complete, the neighborhood will have one of the highest concentrations of brilliant, creative people in London.

The canal is all that separates Google from 3,500 art students. INK/Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

“The point is if there’s 3,500 students, they [Googlers] might form a relationship with Central Saint Martins,” says Allford. ”You come to a city to meet people who aren’t like you, who are different and have different ways of seeing the world. The street life is incredibly important for why you live in a city. Taking that idea of life into the building and social space and what Google call positive friction. You want people to get to their desk and do work, you want them to get around, but you don’t want them to miss each other.”

The plan is to make an office so nice you never want to leave. INK/Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

It is also plugged into larger networks. From Kings Cross, Googlers can get to Cambridge, home to Britain’s tech hardware sector and chipmakers such as ARM — or Microsoft Research, which is just outside Cambridge station — in 45 minutes. From St Pancras station, on the other side of Google’s HQ, they can take the Eurostar to Brussels (capital of the European Union and useful for lobbying eurocrats) or to Paris (Eurodisney) in just two hours.

Googlers could conceivably commute to work from bucolic Cambridge — or Paris. INK/Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

The building will remain inherently flexible, says Allford. “We’ve talked with Google about theater, stage set, and props: The building is the theater. It lasts 100 years. The stage set is the auditorium. It lasts 20 years and is a building within the building. The props are — the little meeting rooms, the furniture, all this, which ideally you could reconfigure overnight.” The idea is to have a dynamic, flexible space defined by the people who occupy it, not the other way around.

The building stretches 1,082 feet from end to end — as long as the Shard is tall. Allford Hall Monaghan Morris

It can hold 4,500 employees, more than twice the total number of Googlers in London. The building will be ready in 2016. Until then, London-based Googlers will continue to be split between two offices at Victoria and one off Charing Cross Road.

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Image: Martin Varsavsky