Here East \

Here East is made up of three buildings; the 850,000 sq ft former Broadcast Centre, the 300,000 sq ft former Press Centre, and a new 750-seat auditorium, totalling over one million sq ft of space to be transformed into London’s home for making.

Here East is already home to BT Sport, and is rapidly fulfilling an ambition to create a community of offices, restaurants, and studio space, alongside new East London bases for UCL, Loughborough University and Hackney Community College. Artists who have established studios in the building include award winning dance choreographer and director Wayne McGregor.

Here East complements the "Olympicopolis" vision for the former 2012 site which will host new outposts for the V&A, Sadler's Wells Theatre and the London College of Fashion.

To generate the Here East masterplan we looked to neighbouring Hackney Wick for inspiration. Its tight knit light industrial factories and yards are home to the highest concentration of artists anywhere in Europe. The lively and organic hinterland suggested to us ways we could make a series of huge buildings more manageable, social and dynamic, and create a structure with the potential to evolve. This helped us to design an environment - an ecosystem - to incubate a diverse range and scale of businesses, with a ‘life support system’ of bars, cafes and restaurants and a pleasant communal landscape encouraging interaction and collaboration.

To make environmental and commercial sense of the 850,000 sq ft former Broadcast Centre we imagined it as a ‘crust’ and a ‘core’. We removed the windowless façade to create a 16m deep outer layer of flexible work, studio and retail spaces around the perimeter of the building - maximising natural daylight, ventilation and views - and converted the heart of the deep plan into state of the art broadcast studios for BT Sport and the data centre.

The ground floor of the Press Centre has been converted into the Innovation Hub; a 300,000 sq ft, double-height space accommodating a diverse range of co-workspaces. The adjacent landscaped canalside is now home to a number of attractive cafes and bars, with retractable glazed fronts and outdoor seating to optimise the views. The Yard features facilities for outdoor cinema, markets, and public events, providing a civic focus for the campus. The Theatre, a 950-seat auditorium with high-end conferencing technology will be used by Here East tenants, for product launches, talks, screenings, exhibitions and presentations, and also by the local community for cultural events.

The Gantry, which looks out over the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, has been fitted out with a series of bespoke studio-shed structures and external making spaces for artists, designers and craftspeople to design and manufacture on site, participating in Here East’s entrepreneurial ethos.

Read the Here East Case Study