Caruso St John's mixed-use St Pancras Campus

Architect Peter St John does not mince words about the standard of commercial development in London: ‘unsophisticated’ and ‘depressing’ are among the printable judgements. Offices tend either to glassy banality or gauche attention-seeking, and have a deadening effect on public space. ‘There aren’t many commercial buildings one can really admire,’ he says. ‘It’s not an area of great creativity.’

St Pancras Campus is Caruso St John’s first foray into the field in this country, and the architects set out with an agenda. ‘We wanted to do something that respects the scale of the city and makes reference to the particular architecture of the neighbourhood,’ says St John. ‘It’s about looking closely and doing things that are specific.’ 

Arranged as three weighty buildings covering a 70m by 80m urban block between Royal College Street and St Pancras Way, the campus is conceived as a microcosm of the familiar European city – the sort of place where the 35-year-old practice has done much of its work – but with a London accent. Alongside a substantial office block are two apartment buildings. In the bases of each block there are retail spaces and rugged light industrial units. Threaded between them are public routes and a small landscaped piazza.

‘The mix is the interesting thing,’ says St John. ‘You can make something that feels truly urban.’ 

That opportunity was born out of particular circumstances. The developer, W·RE, is committed to building well, but specialises in offices and would happily have stuck to that. Camden Council, however, required that the scheme comprise about one third housing – with nearly half for social rent – while retaining the quantity of makers’ space that previously filled the site in single-storey workshops. Decent budgets help, of course, and the project benefits from rising values rippling out from the nearby King’s Cross regeneration area.

That is bringing rapid change to the immediate environs – a patchwork of waves reflecting historic development. To the west are 18th-century gridded brick and stucco terraces. At its north-east corner the site meets a bridge over Regent’s Canal, which attracted industry from the 19th century. To the south is a 20th-century layer of low-density sheds and larger lumps of post-war reconstruction.

By splitting the development into separate buildings with a site-wide basement, Caruso St John could adjust its scale to the surroundings. The office block filling the southern end of the plot rises to seven storeys, but with pronounced set-backs from the fourth floor. Approaching along Royal College Street, you don’t see the building until you are almost on it.

The architects were concerned that homes should have equal prominence and not be hidden in the hinterland. Five and six-storey blocks fill out the remaining corners of the squarish plot. Deep balconies look onto streets on three sides. Together with the roof terraces of the office building, they should enliven the upper levels. 

Activity at ground level comes from views into workspace from every side and the public spaces that help to tie the campus into its setting. A sheltered courtyard between the office and residential buildings is open to the street at either end and makes a pleasant place to linger, with benches and planted beds. Other routes into this pocket park are formed by a service road through the office building and a pedestrian path between the housing blocks. Their narrowness recalls alleys and mews. 

Street facades also make subtle reference to their context. There is allusion to the area’s red and white Victorian buildings – from the adjacent Golden Lion pub to St Pancras station – in the trabeated facades of the office building. Spandrels of russet sandstone sit between hefty ground-bearing piers of chalky, rough-textured concrete. 

These elements recur at smaller scale in the apartment buildings, where Caruso St John added brown brick that echoes nearby houses and green tiled facades behind the loggias – a nod to the decoration of a pub across the canal. 

Office facades are composed on a heroic scale, with the concrete piers giving expression to an unusually large 12m structural grid and consequently beefy steel frame. Square ‘knots’ at every floor level articulate structural connections within, and lend an almost classical note. There’s also a deliberate evocation, says St John, of Camden’s optimistic 1960s housing schemes. 

If there’s a lot going on, it comes together – in every sense – at the corners. Due both to the irregular plot and a steep fall across the site, all are slightly different. In the office building, sandstone folded to make Miesian inverted junctions is coupled with pairs of conjoined concrete piers, tied with extra ‘knots’ in intricate flourishes that catch the eye in oblique views.

Corners of the residential blocks also received special attention. At the canal bridge, flat brickwork meets the ends of open loggias in an ambiguous asymmetry. ‘We tried to create “faces”, not just facades,’ says St John. ‘It gives the buildings more figure and feels unusual because housing is normally “background”.’

Look closely and a wealth of rich detail emerges, even in the humbler ‘backs’. Stone fascias extending from balconies are recessed neatly into brickwork. Green tiles meet brick in precise mitre joints. Glazing is set flush with masonry. ‘When you inset a window it looks familiar and banal,’ says St John, ‘but continuity of the surface can be used to shape buildings in a more sculptural way’. 

Such an abundance of diverse incidents is held together by the clear coherence of an architectural system. Unlike similar-sized London developments, where picturesque variety is contrived by parcelling out pieces to different architects, here a formal order is confidently asserted. ‘We were trying to achieve a piece of designed urbanism,’ says St John, ‘in which all the different purposes had dignity.’

A certain grandeur carries through into the interiors. In the office building, this comes from a distinctly industrial scale and character. The high-ceilinged lobby is a happy by-product of the industrial units behind. Visitors might pick up a hint of warehouses in the dark-stained floor of end-grain larch blocks. Walk through to the internal roadway, and its lining of shiny corrugated metal is a glamorous play on the utilitarian cladding of the old sheds. On the upper floors, huge black-painted castellated beams have a powerful presence, and are threaded with service ducts whose intricate layout approaches art.

Natural materials add warmth and comfort to common parts. Grey felt ceilings soften the acoustic, and oak battens line walls. They might also represent unseen efforts to reduce energy use: air-source pumps supply all heating, and insulation exceeds code. The structure is, of course, carbon-intensive, but timber was precluded by regulation, says St John, who would now prefer to work on reuse than new buildings.

Across the sheltered little square, the housing represents another form of responsible development. Though W·RE has never developed homes before, it opted for the long-term commitment of build-to-rent for its own portion. The interior specification of social rent flats in the second block is different but the facades and common parts are identical.

Lobbies evoke the gracious living offered by 19th-century apartment buildings in central Europe. Glazed oak screens open onto beautiful floors of inlaid grey terrazzo, and walls lined in tiles of almost iridescent green. With sandstone balustrades and canal views from the roomy loggias, it makes some of the finest social housing seen in years. 

This will be a good place to live or work. Caruso St John’s creative approach to difficult problems  has created something rich and distinctive for inhabitants. The campus is good for the city beyond its perimeter, too, helping to anchor a neighbourhood in transition. It shows that with imagination and collective will, speculative commercial development can take from its place, and give back in equal measure. 

In numbers 

Construction cost £100 million
Months on site 37
GIA 24,360m² (office 16,300m²; light industrial 3,300m²; residential 4,000m²; retail 760m²)
Apartments 33 (14 affordable)