St Giles Square
At Centre Point, the closure of the road beneath the 1960’s complex has provided a unique opportunity to create a major new public space. MICA are leading delivery of the St Giles Square with a hard and soft landscaping design which has a bold geometry that evokes the spirit of the Sixties whilst responding to the historic St Giles context, tying the overall complex together, helping it read as one composition.Client
Almacantar
Location
St Giles, London
Size
7,000m2
Dates
2016–2020
The new public square, including the spaces around, will be comparable in scale to some of London's most famous public squares and spaces. We’ve worked on animating spaces in the existing complex for restaurants and shops so that the area around the building will be a vibrant, unique space with its own special identity.
Significant structural alterations extensively open up the ground and first floors to create expansive and continuous glazed frontages that will allow the public realm to flow through the ground level, improving connections, access, activity and attractiveness, whilst creating a distinctive identity for the area.
The space has been zoned into clear circulation routes, fixed seating space under trees and flexible space for pop-up events. The provision of flexible space, along with pop-up bollard services provision facilitates events such as food markets, art installations or music. External seating from perimeter cafes is delineated in the paving pattern.
MICA curated and sourced a mix of mature trees specimens, providing interest at different times throughout the year to ensure the space has a special character in each season. This selection was developed in consultation with the London Borough of Camden landscaping team, mindful of the wider mix in the Borough. This has required the careful design of tree pits and drainage to enable tree planting with the below ground constraints of adjacent basements and services.
A key aspiration for the project was to create a new identity for the area, previously seen as being undesirable, dominated by buses and traffic. We were inspired by the unique contemporary heritage of the Centre Point complex and developed a bold graphic paving pattern to express the zig-zag movement around the Tower and through the space.
MICA developed robust specifications for the paving, seating and lighting, appropriate to the high footfall. The paving was developed as large format granite slabs, pre-cut to bespoke tapering sizes to reduce noisy cutting on site and allow for faster installation.
We also collaborated with Eley Kishimoto to develop a site-specific pattern book. We have further developed these for the bespoke sculpted pre-cast concrete bench designs, relating to the expressed pre-cast concrete frame of Centre Point Tower.