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Kings Place is a building in
London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...
's King's Cross area, providing
music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...
and
visual arts The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics (art), ceramics, photography, video, image, filmmaking, design, crafts, and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual a ...
venues combined with seven floors of office space. It has housed the editorial offices of ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' newspaper since December 2008 and is the former headquarters of
Network Rail Network Rail Limited is the owner (via its subsidiary Network Rail Infrastructure Limited, which was known as Railtrack plc before 2002) and railway infrastructure manager, infrastructure manager of most of the railway network in Great Britain. ...
and CGI.


Overview

Kings Place was a commercial development providing 26,000 sq. m of office space. Construction on the site began in 2005 and was completed in summer 2008; the opening festival started on 1 October 2008. In late 2008 the building became the home for ''
The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...
'' and ''
The Observer ''The Observer'' is a British newspaper published on Sundays. First published in 1791, it is the world's oldest Sunday newspaper. In 1993 it was acquired by Guardian Media Group Limited, and operated as a sister paper to ''The Guardian'' ...
'' newspapers. Kings Place houses the first public concert hall to be newly built in central London since the completion of the Barbican Centre concert hall in 1982. (
Cadogan Hall Cadogan Hall is a 950-seat capacity concert hall in Sloane Terrace in Chelsea, London, Chelsea in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, London, England. The resident music ensemble at Cadogan Hall is the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra ( ...
and LSO St Luke's were adapted from old buildings in that period.) It has a range of facilities for performance, exhibition and education. The music, arts and restaurant areas are arranged around public spaces which form a central hub to the building. The arts facilities include free access to a range of commercial art galleries. Kings Place is home to
Aurora Orchestra Aurora Orchestra is a British chamber orchestra, co-founded in 2004 by conductors Nicholas Collon and Robin Ticciati. The orchestra is based in London, where it is Resident Orchestra at Southbank Centre and Resident Ensemble at Kings Place. The ...
as its resident orchestra, and also regularly hosts a number of other artistic associates including the
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) is a British period instrument orchestra. The OAE is a resident orchestra of the Southbank Centre, London, associate orchestra at Glyndebourne Festival Opera Artistic Associate at Kings Place, and ...
and
London Sinfonietta The London Sinfonietta is an English contemporary chamber music, chamber orchestra founded in 1968 and based in London. The ensemble has headquarters at Kings Place and is Resident Orchestra at the Southbank Centre. Since its inaugural concert ...
. The opera company
OperaUpClose OperaUpClose is a national touring opera company, led by Artistic Director Flora McIntosh, The company was founded in 2009 to produce its début production, Robin Norton-Hale's Olivier Award-winning adaptation of Puccini's ''La bohème'' at T ...
announced that it would move from its present Islington pub location, the King's Head, to Kings Place in 2015.


Kings Place Music Foundation (charity)

Kings Place Music Foundation is the charity set up to run the music spaces at Kings Place. Gifted with the performing and back-of-house spaces on a long lease for a peppercorn rent, KPMF aims to deliver a very rich and busy music programme financed by ticket sales and the hire of the Kings Place facilities for rehearsals, recordings and conferences. The charity works in partnership with music and arts organisations to offer a range of learning and participation activities to the local community and to the wider public. Activities began before the construction of the building finished and are growing steadily year by year. KPMF offers access to creative spaces and activities for both new and established audiences with affordable prices for all. The KMPF music programme is funded entirely by revenue from ticket sales and income generated through event and conference hire, and without reliance on public funding.


Location

Kings Place sits on the east side of
York Way York Way (part of the A5200) is a major road in the London Borough of Islington, running north for one mile from the junction of Pentonville Road and Euston Road, adjacent to King's Cross railway station towards Kentish Town and Holloway. At ...
, 150 metres from King's Cross/ St Pancras train stations. On its eastern side the building overlooks
Battlebridge Basin Battlebridge Basin is a canal basin in King's Cross, in the London Borough of Islington. It is located off the Regent's Canal. Current use The basin contains a number of residential moorings. It is the site of the London Canal Museum, opened ...
on the
Regent's Canal Regent's Canal is a canal across an area just north of central London, England. It provides a link from the Paddington Arm of the Grand Union Canal, north-west of Paddington Basin in the west, to the Limehouse Basin and the River Thames in ea ...
which is also home to many residential boats and the
London Canal Museum London Canal Museum in the King's Cross area of London, England, is a regional museum devoted to the history of London's canals. The museum opened in 1992. Exhibitions and activities The museum covers all aspects of the UK's waterways. The mai ...
.
Central St Martins Central Saint Martins is a constituent college of the University of the Arts London, a public art university in London, England. The college offers full-time courses at foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and a variety of short ...
, one of the art colleges within the
University of the Arts London The University of the Arts London is a public collegiate university in London, England, United Kingdom. It specialises in arts, design, fashion, and the performing arts. The university is a federation of six arts colleges: Camberwell College of ...
, brought a major visual arts community into the area from mid-2011, when it moved into the nearby Argent's
King's Cross Central King's Cross Central (''KXC'') is a mixed-use development in the north-east of central London. The site is owned and controlled by the King's Cross Central Limited Partnership. It consists of approximately of former railway lands to the north ...
development.


Architectural philosophy

Following a limited architectural competition,
Dixon Jones Dixon Jones was a British architectural practice established in 1989 and closed in September 2020. History Dixon Jones was founded by Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones in 1989 as a partnership and became a limited company in 2003. The founders firs ...
was appointed as the architect for Kings Place. The brief was for it to be a large building of far higher quality than the normal spec office development. The building was to be durable, not only in terms of quality of the build materials, but in its design. It had to be spatially generous and environmentally impeccable. Most importantly, it had to fit into a local urban architecture which is not uniform in scale.


Features

The building has wavy glass runs along the west-facing York Way frontage; this three-layered glass façade is a free-standing transparent surface made up of hundreds of very slightly curved sheets of glass. As well as reducing heat gain from the afternoon sun and increasing wind resistance, the glass wall provides Kings Place with a distinctive facade.


Facilities

*Hall One – 415-seat concert hall with fixed seating (302 seats in the stalls and 113 in the balcony) *Hall Two – flexible performance and rehearsal space (seats audience of 200 or 330 standing) *St Pancras Room – auditorium for speech, seating 100 *Three rehearsal break-out spaces: **Limehouse Room **Wenlock Room **Horsfall Room *Recording and broadcasting facilities *General dressing rooms *Office space and headquarters for London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment *The Music Base – shared office space with desks for small music organisations *Pangolin London: **Sculpture gallery


Hall One

Hall One, the main concert hall, is a separate structure within the building, it is a box that sits on rubber springs to give it complete acoustic separation from the rest of the building. It is built to a regular geometry, a double cube, that is considered most successful for small concert halls. Structural columns around the hall are set away from the walls to allow curtains to be drawn between the columns and the walls to modify the acoustics for speech or amplified music. It won the "Commercial and Public Access" award and the overall "Gold Award" in the 2009
Wood Awards The Wood Awards (until 2003 the Carpenters' Award) is a British award for working with wood. The award, which was launched in 1971, is bestowed on winners of several categories within buildings and furniture. Awards are presented in The Carpenters ...
.


Acoustics

The architecture of Hall One emerged from a collaboration between Dixon Jones and Arup's acousticians. As part of the research that preceded the design, the developer, the architects, the engineers and the project manager visited Japan to look in detail at a dozen concert halls. The aim was to differentiate very precisely between a variety of modern concert halls and to examine what solution would best meet the requirements of Kings Place. Next a computer model of the proposed Kings Place auditorium was made. This was tested against computer models of the
Concertgebouw Concertgebouw may refer to one of the following concert halls: * Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, Netherlands * Concertgebouw, Bruges, Belgium * Concertgebouw de Vereeniging, Netherlands {{disambiguation Buildings and structures disambiguation pages ...
, the Wigmore and several other halls. In this way it was possible to optimise the design for Hall One before construction began.


Oak veneer

The oak veneer inside Hall One has come from the same 500-year-old German oak tree named ''Contessa''. After felling the wood was cut into 5-metre lengths and boiled at 80 °C for one week, then sliced. The tree produced an acre of wood veneer. It has been used in Hall One to cover the panels, columns, roof coffers, the back of seats, and doors.


Food and drink

The Rotunda Restaurant spans the area of the building facing Regent's Canal and Battlebridge Basin. The Rotunda Bar features a curved bar that mirrors the shape of the building. The Green & Fortune Café is housed in the central atrium of the building on the ground floor level. Green & Fortune is responsible for all food, drink, and hospitality at Kings Place.


Offices

All seven levels above ground at Kings Place are commercial office space. From some angles Kings Place can be seen as four joined but separate structures. This breaking down of the mass of the building was critical to the planners and has allowed light and a sense of openness to penetrate to basement level. Thanks to a series of linking bridges, however, each of the upper floors is experienced by the office user as a very large contiguous plate. For the office users no staircase was provided for general use so the only way to access above ground floors is via the lifts. This makes for inconvenience when the lifts break down and reduces the green impact of the building. The two common staircases have been designed so as only to be available in case of fire.


Outreach programme

Kings Place promotes discovery of the arts in its surrounding boroughs of
Islington Islington ( ) is an inner-city area of north London, England, within the wider London Borough of Islington. It is a mainly residential district of Inner London, extending from Islington's #Islington High Street, High Street to Highbury Fields ...
and Camden. The Kings Place outreach programme works in three areas: Education, Community Engagement and Participation and Family. Music and arts organisations resident and performing at Kings Place offer educational classes, workshops, opportunities for participation in performances as well as family events. Past events and projects have included family drumming workshops and professional development sessions with the London Sinfonietta and their visiting musicians from the Ugandan Dance Academy and a visual arts project with local schools and the Visual Learning Foundation using the construction of the building as inspiration.


References


External links


Official website
{{Coord, 51, 32, 3.63, N, 0, 7, 19.04, W, scale:1563_region:GB, display=title 2008 establishments in England Buildings and structures in the London Borough of Islington Concert halls in London The Guardian Kings Cross, London Music venues completed in 2008 The Observer Office buildings completed in 2008 Tourist attractions in the London Borough of Islington Sculpture galleries in the United Kingdom