8 Bleeding Heart Yard
by GROUPWORK
Client Seaforth Land Holdings
Award RIBA London Award 2025
The award winner tells us: "8 Bleeding Heart Yard reimagines the pre-1970s accumulation of mid to late Victorian shops, warehouses and townhouses on this site in Hatton Garden that were demolished to make way for the concrete-framed ribbon-windowed office building that has stood since.
The project actively explores the emblematic ‘Kunstform’ of a misremembered past embodied in a 3mm perforated recycled metal façade, concealing new timber roof and rear extensions, and upgrades the existing envelope and internal organisation to suit a modern office environment. From a distance the building creates the illusion of permanence, of the authenticity and security of an often idealised past.
On approach this perceived solidity is nothing but a mirage, with details slipped, abstracted and transparent, an incomplete memory and in the manner of Palazzo del Te’s apparently falling pediments and triglyphs, the expression of a façade as non-structural, decorative and abstracted from earlier tectonic forms."
The jury says: "Photovoltaic panels, high levels of insulation and airtightness and an air-source heat pump all contribute to impressively low in-use energy credentials. Forensically studying archival evidence of the predecessor buildings that had once occupied the site – a range of Victorian shops and houses – the architects sought to recreate the historical roofline and façade arrangement. This they achieved by effectively applying a new shroud which replays the past, on top of the 1970s shell."
Read the full citation from the RIBA Awards Jury on RIBA Journal
Contractor RED Construction
Structural engineer Atelier One
Sustainability Buro Happold
Environmental/M&E engineer Webb Yates Engineers
Project management Avison Young
Quantity surveyor/cost consultant Quantem
Acoustic engineer Sandy Brown
Gross internal area 3,386m²
