Client: Helical Bar Plc. & Baylight Ltd

Location: Shepherds Bush, London

Status: Complete

Overview

The Shepherds Building was constructed around 1940 as a GPO telecommunications building. On the Post Office’s demise, Helical & Crispin Kelly bought the building and examined how a 200-metre long building could operate as an office building with only two entrances at either end. It could not be easily let as a multiple occupancy building.

In 2002 the building underwent a full refurbishment with an additional floor added, creating an 8-storey building. The problem of sub-division was solved with one simple device that gave access from the street at the mid point and offered the project an iconic method of branding and stamping its position in the hinterland behind the Green. Initially the access tower was to be mobile and travel the length of the building on rails like a ‘black box’ shelf robot delivering each person to their respective office. Cost, and reality intervened but the very deliberately conceived industrial object, very different from the horizontal and monolithic original building, was retained.