Designed as a new headquarters for Ernst & Young, the ten-storey 1 More London Place provides the company with 35,000 square metres of high-quality, flexible office space on the south bank of the River Thames between London and Tower Bridges. A full-height atrium links the building’s two ‘fingers’ of office space, creating a dramatic entrance space which is crisscrossed with three bridges per floor, with glass balustrades. The central concrete core and four peripheral steel cores are clad with extruded aluminium panels. The 24m-wide column-free floor plates benefit from generous amounts of daylight through the atrium and fully glazed facades, helping to minimise the building’s energy usage.

1 More London Place is one of six Foster-designed buildings that make up the More London masterplan. It has created a new working community on a site that has remained undeveloped for decades. The project forms a key element in Southwark’s regeneration and occupies a strategic position on the cultural and tourist pedestrian route from Tate Modern, the Globe Theatre and Southwark Cathedral to HMS Belfast and the Design Museum.

The footprint of the individual buildings has been generated by the layout of public routes across the site. A strong diagonal street leading from London Bridge Station to Tower Bridge follows the ideal pedestrian route generated by research conducted by Space Syntax. This is intersected by north-south routes which link the riverfront with the hinterland of Bermondsey, breaking down the barrier between the local community and the area’s many tourists and other visitors. The building are slotted between the routes, arranged like the open fingers of a hand. In addition to the major routes there are narrower streets or alleyways in the tradition of the city’s warehouse buildings, providing alternative shortcuts across the site.