The Gramophone Works in west London was previously home to Saga Records. The company, whose labels included renowned reggae specialist Trojan, used to make budget discs there, using recycled vinyl from the nearby Philips pressing plant.
Now the old concrete structure itself is being upcycled to a very different beat. It’s becoming a low carbon, health and wellbeing focused office building, plus canalside café – with 870 tonnes of prefabricated engineered wood components providing the main structural material for its dramatic outwards and upwards increase in volume.
The old building, alongside the Grand Union Canal, was originally a paint works, home from the 1920s to its 1960s musical incarnation to paint and wallpaper producer Sanderson. When Saga closed in the 1980s it was converted into small business units.
Subsequently, in 2018, it was bought by current owners Resolution Properties.
Architect of the new building, Studio RHE, was keen to retain as much of the site’s colourful heritage as possible and convert the space with minimum environmental impact. It decided to effectively make the former factory its central building block and wrap the £22m new structure around it, boosting floor area from 21,634ft2 to 66,445ft2.
“The idea was to celebrate the story of the site, so first the concrete structure, which is two storeys high with a basement, was stripped back to expose the façade. It was repaired, cleaned and made safe,” said Studio RHE’s Tom Foster.
“The building also had two five-storey towers, incorporating a stairwell and lift shaft, indicating an original unrealised ambition to expand upwards. So, really, we’ve fulfilled its potential. We’ve retained the towers – in fact, while you can see the old structure from the inside, these are the only elements of it on view from the exterior. The south tower is now a goods lift, while in the north tower we’ve made each floor a meeting room, with a beacon lighthouse at the top.”
The new building adds another four floors to the old. Steel beams were inserted through the concrete walls and bolted to the structural columns to provide integrity across the width of the building and evenly distribute the new loadings from the engineered wood storeys above. Around the building, 25m continuous flight auger (CFA) piles were also installed to support the wider new structure.
“The 6-7-tonne steel beams span between the original columns and create a transfer frame to marry the existing structure to the new,” said Dean Linthwaite of the timber and hybrid specialist build contractor B&K Structures.
“The steel then connects directly to the CLT panels above. It was a challenging process, but interesting and seeing the concrete and steel connecting to the CLT soffit, the old and the new, is really impressive.”
The load-bearing structural frame of the new build comprises 310 tonnes of glulam columns and beams from German manufacturer Derix, plus 560 tonnes of CLT from Binderholz of Austria.
The latter is used for the floor and wall panels, plus a critical element of the build, three 9-12m-high cores, with those in the east and west housing lifts and stair wells, and the central one a lift shaft.
“The cores effectively form the shear walls of the development. They’re the backbone of the new build, with the loads making their way back down them,” said Mr Linthwaite.
The lower three storeys of the new build predominantly use CLT for exterior walls, clad in a brick skin “to reference canal-side warehousing”, but punched through with extensive areas of glazing. In contrast, one corner, housing the café, features glazed curtain walling.
The latter also forms the exterior of the upper three floors, with a timber terrace running around the third floor overlooking the canal. The curtain walling system itself is an aluminium framed structure, with metal fins expressed to the outside bolted to the exposed glulam behind.
Studio RHE already had a track record in using engineered timber and, said Mr Foster, likes its “malleability”.
“For instance, we used glulam and CLT extensively in the redevelopment of the Import and Export buildings in the Republic office campus in London’s East India Dock.
This entailed adding multi-storey modularised timber insertions to increase commercial floor space and create new connections through the existing structures,” he said. At the other end of the scale, he added, Studio RHE, working with Lesko Modular, has developed the nHouse, a range of CLT and glulam modular homes for the self-build, private development and social housing sectors.
A further attraction in using engineered timber for the Gramophone Works was its lightness.
“You have these large-scale CLT and glulam components, with the CLT panels for the main cores being up to 2.4×12.5m, and they’re all being fitted into place by a team of five to eight guys with a tower and mobile crane,” said Mr Foster.
“If we’d used other materials, building onto the original structure, we’d only have been able to go up to five storeys due to the weight rather than the six we’ve got using timber.” Another benefit of using prefabricated timber for the site was the blend of build speed and the low number of component deliveries.
“In any busy urban site, where space is tight, build logistics are critical. We couldn’t have multiple deliveries causing congestion and didn’t have the luxury of room to store lots of materials, ” said Mr Linthwaite.
“Although it’s one of the biggest engineered timber commercial developments in London, all the main elements were delivered in just 44 truckloads – an average of two a week through the timber build part of the programme.
“With the design and engineering team using 3D modelling, everything was prefabricated to fit, with all the openings and M&E pockets pre-cut and it was delivered on a just-in-time basis. Each element arrived as we needed to install it.”
Its sustainability and particularly its carbon benefits add to timber’s allure for Studio RHE. “Environmental impact and especially carbon targets have to be an increasingly important consideration in all construction and the timber used in the Gramophone Works stores 1,066 tonnes of CO2,” said Mr Foster, adding that the building will also feature a bank of photovoltaic panels with an output of 12,060kWh a year.
“We’re targeting a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating, which is higher than planning approval requires,” he said.
An increasing focus of Studio RHE is the health and wellness attributes of its projects and here timber scores again.
“Everyone agrees timber is a beautiful material and just nice to be around,” said Mr Foster. “But there’s also an increasing body of research demonstrating that it has actual well-being effects. Timber workplaces, particularly with the material expressed as it is in the Gramophone Works, have been shown to increase productivity, improve concentration and even help with staff retention.”
The particularly salient matter currently of fire safety did not prove a significant issue.
The large areas of timber expressed internally received a surface spread of flame treatment, while the design and dimensions of the engineered wood elements give the various areas of the building structural fire resistance ratings of 90 to 120 minutes.
There were hurdles to clear. According to Mr Linthwaite the temporary works erected around the CLT cores as the rest of the building grew up around them proved technically demanding. Wind was also an occasional issue.
“Craning in the large CLT panels was like hoisting a sail, so we had a few instances when we had to wait for the weather,” said Mr Linthwaite.
Noise transference between floors also had to be dealt with.
“But we’d have had to tackle that in a steel framed building too,” said Mr Foster. “It was a case of using insulating mat and doing the calculations.”
Clearly none of the challenges proved insurmountable, however, as the remodelled and retuned Gramophone Works, is on track, after a two-year build programme, to open Easter 2021.
And, as the café is open to the public, anyone can pay a visit to see the harmonious interplay between new and old, concrete, steel and timber.
