The building is an open plan office providing a high quality professional environment which will allow staff to work more efficiently and effectively.

The open plan nature of the building will enable staff to co-operate across teams more effectively and share information better. The building will enhance flexible working for employees and provide Ordnance Survey with many options for its day-to-day work and enable future technological developments to be easily incorporated. The building has been designed to be as environmentally friendly and energy efficient as possible and to be cost effective to maintain and has been awarded a BREEAM Excellent rating.

The ECO design of the building means that the multitude of computer hardware that is generating heat is extracted to 1 of 18 underground chambers to store the heat until it is required for heating the office environments! Other than this, there is no other source of central heating within the three storey, four acres of building. In fact the issue is not about heating the building but it is in fact cooling the building down!
In order that the building maintains an ambient temperature for sitting and working constructively at a desk, the architect calculated how much concrete needed to be on show, this in turn, turns rising warm air into cold as it touches the cold slab.
However in creating an ECO central heating system that doesn't independently burn fossil fuels or have air conditioning systems in every room, it does in turn create another problem. Noise. With limited quantities of soft internal finishes to soak up noise attenuation, the potential problem is an echo box (cave syndrome).
This is where LCP and Broadway Malayan developed the specifications to produce:
• The correct noise absorption / attenuation
• Aesthetically pleasing products
• Correct thermal ratings
• Correct fire ratings
• All within Budget
The end result:
A very happy client with a state of the art, stunning, ECO friendly building, creating a superb working environment with cost efficiency at the core of its design.