Joseph Priestly Building, Birmingham City University
Workplace Refurbishment

BCU took on the lease of a 56,000 sq. ft shell and core building and our brief was to relocate over 500 of the University’s Professional Services staff to Birmingham city centre into the four storey (plus basement) building. The departments included Estates, Campus Management Services, HR, Finance, IT, Learning and Library Resources, and Academic Services.

​

There was a substantial period of stakeholder consultation with each department participating in a numerous design sessions with us. In addition to this, representatives from all departments participated in a furniture showroom day in Clerkenwell, London to view furniture options and try them out.

​

The resulting design took new ways of working for University staff to another level with each floor having 100 desks per 14,000 sq ft. floor which were allocated differently in each department but with an element of hot desking on all. Each floor has a feature kitchen area to promote staff socialising as well as an extensive selection of breakout spaces to use for informal working and team meetings. The ground floor housed a staff only café area as well as only four formal meeting rooms for the whole building due to the variety of breakout spaces on each floor.