Transforming an historic brownfield site into a residential, retail, and commercial destination

Chocolate Factory

Workspace Group wanted to transform this complex brownfield site by re-establishing the Chocolate Factory at the heart of a new city quarter. They wanted it to retain and enhance spaces for the existing creative commercial community, while delivering new performance, retail, and restaurant space alongside 230 new homes. They engaged our interdisciplinary team of designers and planners to help.

Our master plan converts the previously car dominated industrial site into a dense urban quarter easily accessed by public and sustainable transport routes. This included re-establishing access to Wood Green underground station. The new street network guides pedestrians intuitively to Chocolate Square, surrounded by a hard and soft landscaped gathering and relaxing space and new homes.

For the building itself, our design celebrates the existing structure. We focused on carefully peeling away decades of insensitive additions to the original factory building to enhance and celebrate the original architecture. We capped it off with a glowing, lightweight roof pavilion granting views of and visible from the wider city and adjacent Alexandra Park.

Through extensive collaboration across our diverse team, we significantly reduced the historic buildings’ energy demand while mitigating overheating risks. We also worked with Haringey Council, the Greater London Authority, and a wider project team to transition from on-site gas-fired combined heat and power to more energy efficient methods and roof-mounted photovoltaics.

Construction is currently underway on this project, which was shortlisted in the Future Space category at the Pineapple Awards in 2019.