One Practice is an ethos and culture that is encouraged and celebrated at SimpsonHaugh to ensure all team members across the practice, regardless of location, are working together as one in a collaborative, creative, cohesive manner, providing the opportunity to harness the very best from our talented and diverse team.
This year’s event took place in London, celebrating the skyline of this great city and providing the wider team the opportunity to visit some of our completed projects such as One Blackfriars, Dollar Bay, and Phase 1, Circus West Village at Battersea Power Station.
Since our last One Practice event we’ve welcomed 8 new team members to the practice. We also recognised 15 team members who have reached a key long-service milestone since the last event. This year was also particularly special due to the opening of our new Birmingham studio last month. It’s fantastic to see the practice continue to grow and develop.
We began the day at our London studio in Clerkenwell, giving everyone a chance to catch up with colleagues – but also for some of our team members to meet in person for the first time.
We then headed over to Embassy Gardens to meet Brian Eckersley of Eckersley O’Callaghan, who kindly agreed to give us a tour and talk on the design of the Sky Pool. The first of its kind, the transparent Sky Pool sits at 10-storeys and spans the 15m gap between two adjacent residential buildings. 5m of pool also sits over the buildings at each end to make a total length of 25m. This remarkable feat of engineering is constructed using clear acrylic and contains a total of 150 tonnes of water. It was incredibly interesting to hear about the considerable engineering challenges presented and ultimately overcome by the project team.
Following the tour, we proceeded to walk to Battersea Power Station to experience the incredible regeneration that has taken place there over recent years, creating a vibrant community that benefits from a sense of place and outstanding leisure, hospitality, and retail amenities. As Phase 1, Circus West Village, and the subsequent redevelopment of the Arches, both designed by SimpsonHaugh, were the initial catalyst for regeneration at Battersea Power Station, this was the perfect opportunity to revisit with the team and celebrate the ambition of the Masterplan as a whole. It was amazing to see the completed Power Station, one of the capital’s most recognisable landmarks, beautifully restored and repurposed into an exciting new retail destination.
We had the opportunity to visit the newly restored Control Room A, the first of the Grade II* listed building’s two original Control Rooms which managed the distribution of electricity across London from the early 1930s. We were also lucky enough to spend some time at Lift 109, a power station exhibition, multi-media display and chimney lift experience, which offered spectacular sunset and nighttime views of the city. We ended the day with food and drinks at Arcade, a new food hall which has just opened within BPS.
One Practice is an important event to us, as an opportunity to celebrate individual contributions in addition to what we’ve achieved together as a collaborative whole.
See photos from the day below.