Soho Place is an enormously complex, technically demanding, breathtakingly audacious puzzle piece, masterfully pulling together the space above one of London’s most crowded basements (However, being AHMM, they won’t be making a fuss about that). The building organises and reshapes Oxford Street’s eastern end, an ambitious response to Crossrail, tying together the extravagant perspective of Oxford Street with the meandering charm of Charing Cross Road.
The north building, No. 1 Soho Place, is a ten-story composition neatly straddling the Byzantine tunnels of Tottenham Court Road station below. And not just any tunnels, a subterranean labyrinth of Victorian sewer lines, Post Office mail rail, and the frantic spaghetti of London Underground and Crossrail. The whole thing had to be carefully stitched together with steel and concrete, threading columns between train tunnels with millimeter precision: Simon Allford describes it ‘as a swiss watch built at an urban scale’.
The south building, No. 2/4 Soho Place, is a nine-story double act. The bottom half is a theatre, West End’s first new-build in 50 years. Nica Burns of Nimax Theatres had a hand in it, which guaranteed some drama, literally. The top half? That’s 18,000 square feet of office space with killer views, mostly column-free, and reached via a ‘superlift’ (because just saying “lift” just wouldn’t be theatrical). Nimax Theatres locked in the theater on a 125-year lease, watch this space, as they say.
A claim to fame: Soho Place gave Soho its first new street name in 72 years! Derwent London and AHMM dreamed it all up, they’re a great team: a once in every 72 year inspiration (and they seem to have those everyday). The new public space links Charing Cross Road to Soho Square, a welcoming pedestrian escape from the throng of Oxford Street.
Sustainability? Plenty of that, this is AHMM and Derwent after all. One Oxford Street runs on renewable energy. There are solar panels, greywater recycling, and biodiverse brown roofs, which means a ton of happy insects to buzz about your head while you eat your sandwich in Soho Square Gardens. And we all need happy bees.
The whole thing is epically certified; BREEAM Outstanding, LEED Gold, EPC Rating ‘B,’ and a Platinum SmartScore for tech wizardry. It has created a humming, glittering hub in the middle of the West End, attracting some of the biggest visitor numbers in the UK and, as they say in show business, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
