Just around the corner from Aldgate Square, 150 Minories is a reimagining of an existing 1950s office building, repurposed to create a mix of new high-quality homes, a public café, co-working spaces, a new pocket park and a community health & wellbeing hub.
Working for HUB, we have been part of their progressive team looking at how developments can adapt existing commercial buildings to deliver sustainable, community-focused co-living schemes which revitalise central urban locations. By delivering new living spaces in the City of London, this project looks to link the commercial hub of the city with the vibrant east end.
One of the key drivers from the outset of the project was to improve the permeability through the site from The Minories through to Vine Street behind. The building designs by Morris+Co open up a new passageway through the refurbished building, creating a direct route through to a new pocket park along Vine Street.
Currently an underutilised service yard, the new publicly accessible pocket park interfaces with the proposed café, which spills out into the space. Generous seating areas, planting and table tennis tables provide space for relaxation and recreation for residents and the local community, with flexible areas for food stalls, events and community art installations.
The designs have focused on opportunities for improved health and wellbeing for residents, with a wide range of communal amenities including bookable dining rooms, social lounges, a gym, cinema room and integrated cycle facilities. A large amenity terrace has been created at roof level, which connects directly to the residents’ communal lounge and cooking & dining areas at this level. Large bi-fold doors blur the divide between inside and outside, with an architectural shade structure providing a comfortable outdoor space in the city in the height of summer.
The landscape designs make reference to the Goodmans Fields tenter ground, which was located just to the east of the site and was used for stretching and drying newly made cloth using frames and ‘tenter hooks’ during the Industrial Revolution.
The roof terrace is centred around a large communal dining table, with a range of sunny seating booths nestled in amongst generous planting areas, looking out over the city. The design has been shaped to be wheelchair accessible and to provide a range of opportunities for residents to socialise in both small and larger groups, as well as more private spaces to get away from it all.
The building has been designed to sit sensitively into the context of The Minories, with a series of stepping masses and datums tying into adjacent building lines, with the amenity roof terraces making the very most of the wider city skyline, with views out towards Tower Bridge, The Shard and The Gherkin.
