Many disciplines, one building
Designed by Stanton Williams, Marshgate is UCL’s single largest building and the main educational hub of UCL East. Together with One Pool Street, it forms the first phase of the campus: 50,000 sqm of a site planned to reach 180,000 sqm, home to around 4,000 students and 700 staff, and the largest single expansion since the university was founded nearly 200 years ago.
Marshgate brings together expertise from nine UCL faculties, and was designed to set aside traditional university structures, with different disciplines working together in shared laboratories and studios. For us that meant supplying the loose furniture for wet and dry laboratories, conservation labs, fabrication workshops, ceramics studios and executive education suites, each with its own requirements and ways of working, alongside the shared library, refectory and common rooms where they meet.
At Marshgate, we worked with UCL’s project teams, Turner & Townsend, AECOM and Sheppard Robson, the delivery and interior architect, to specify 6,065 items across eight floors.
“Without JPA we would not have been able to translate the architect’s concept into a real-world solution.” Jane Arthurs, Mobilisation Manager, UCL. There is more on the project in our Marshgate case study.
Chosen with the people who will use it
Each of those groups needed a say before anything was ordered. Sheppard Robson’s interior design team, ID:SR, ran structured engagement sessions with UCL’s Core Academic Group to agree the look and feel of every space, and we worked with them to turn those decisions into a specification.
Stakeholders took part in design workshops, showroom walkabouts, product demonstrations and testing sessions before anything was ordered, and the Pool Street specification went through seven revisions before it was final.
Libraries and study space
A university library now does several jobs at once: silent study, group work, and somewhere to meet.
At King’s College London’s Franklin-Wilkins and IOP libraries, we worked with the Learning & Teaching Space Improvement Board to turn them into multifunctional study environments, with expanded silent study, social seating for group work, bookable study rooms, meeting pods and quiet areas with information hubs. Installation was phased over the summer to keep disruption to a minimum.
For researchers rather than students, our British Library project created a permanent shared home for 80 researchers from the BBC and education.
Installed around the academic year
A new building opens on a fixed date, usually the start of term.
UCL East opened in two stages, One Pool Street in autumn 2022 and Marshgate in autumn 2023, and we installed across both in phases, with eight floors at Marshgate alone. At UCL’s Institute of Education, two floors were furnished in a live building, one floor a week, with time left for snagging and sign-off before occupation, working alongside Overbury and the other contractors on site. There is more on planning installations around term dates in our guide to what fits in a half-term.
Furniture that outlasts the fit-out
A university building is expected to last for decades, and the furniture should too.
Marshgate is rated BREEAM Excellent and designed for a long life, and its furniture was specified to match: a 25-year life, with continuity of parts agreed with manufacturers so it can be repaired rather than replaced, and embodied carbon benchmarked at 424 tonnes of CO2e. Everything we supply carries a 10-year supported warranty, with maintenance after that and take-back at the end of its life. There is more on how we measure and reduce furniture carbon on our sustainable office design page.
Planning a new building?
The earlier we’re involved, the more the furniture can shape the building. Talk to us while it’s still on the architect’s drawings.
Feel free to also browse more using the buttons below
