Number One Wood Street makes a statement that is at once formal and quietly radical.
Fletcher Priest have drawn a building out of the grain of the City, using Portland stone where the weight of history demands it, and a delicate framework of glass and aluminium where the streets curve and shift. It is a piece of architecture that listens to its context, absorbing the oblique views and fractured perspectives that characterise this part of London, and responding with a measured clarity.
The deep set glazing along Cheapside gives the impression of mass and solidity, a reassuring civic face, while to the side streets the building loosens, filtering light through a shifting lattice of brise soleil.
The roof is perhaps the most surprising element. Seen from above, One Wood Street is capped with a green expanse, one of the largest of its kind in the Square Mile, a meadow that replaces the habitats lost to development. That ecological commitment is not window dressing but runs through the entire project, from recycled and low-impact materials to intelligent lighting, chilled beam cooling and a building performance that lifted its BREEAM rating from “Very Good” to “Excellent.”
Woods Bagot, working with the client, translated this architectural discipline into an interior environment that is progressive and precise.
Eversheds, a law firm of international reach but collegiate instincts, wanted to redefine what a legal workplace might be. The result is a hybrid studio model, a space that abandons rigid cellular offices in favour of openness, mobility and collaboration.
Client floors are finished with the kind of refinement you would expect in a City law firm, but they are also fluid and generous, designed to accommodate visiting lawyers from across the firm’s global network. Four thousand square metres are given over to meeting, dining and training, with mediation suites and deal rooms that underline the building’s role as an international hub.
What impresses most is the coherence. Land Securities as developer, Fletcher Priest as architect, Woods Bagot as interior designer and ISG as fit-out contractor all pulled in the same direction.
The result is a workplace that speaks of sustainability and modernity without shouting, a building that can house the intensity of a global law practice while still offering a pocket square of sunlight at street level and a roof garden where wildflowers and lawyers share the air. One Wood Street has the calm assurance of a project that knows exactly what it wants to be: a City office that respects its past, embraces the present and quietly, and confidently, points to the future.
