250 City Road

250 City Road is a landmark development for the Berkeley Group, located on a brown-field site near to the thriving Old Street Hub, known as “Silicon Roundabout”.

Designed by Foster + Partners, the scheme is truly mixed-use with 9 blocks of residential, hotel, commercial and retail accommodation. Culturally, the project is to provide new welfare facilities for the local community and two new public spaces.

The existing site is a run-down 1980s commercial office park. It formerly was occupied by a number of Victorian workshops located around a canal basin (now in-filled). Running immediately adjacent to the City Road boundary is the London Underground Northern Line Tunnel and within our site is a disused construction access shaft.

The highest tower at 43 storeys has a particular slender aspect ratio, leading to a solution of a buttressed core stability system. The core is buttressed through a series of asymmetric abutment walls, located between the 8th and 25th floors. The final configuration was established through parametric design to determine the optimum arrangement, satisfying the criteria of cost, minimal loss of floor area and architectural layout.