Julie's Boggle

Our company office move, which has been on the cards for about, oh, a year at least, is finally getting started this week.

It’s going to be fun moving into a brand-new building specially commissioned for us, but it’ll also be sad to leave the current buildings, especially our main building, One New Change.

Many years ago. One New Change used to belong to the Bank of England. As a result, it’s quite a quirky building, with all sorts of elaborate walk-in safes, cages, and “refuge zones” (bomb shelters to the uninitiated) down in the basement levels. This gives it a rather unusual character for a city office environment.

Inside it’s an absolute rabbit warren and a complete pain to find your way around — mostly because it’s vast! (It takes up an entire block!) The building is also showing its age – particularly the air-conditioning system which repeatedly lost its will to live over the last few London summers.

For all that, I think the building has a certain charm. It’s got a pretty courtyard in the centre, a lovely swooping curve along the New Change street side, and its location right next-door to St Pauls adds a lot of atmosphere. It also helps that the IT department are housed in separate offices across the road where we can appreciate the aesthetics of the building without actually having to deal with it overly much.

(I love being able to see the gleaming top of St Pauls and the little tourists moving around on the top gallery from my desk. )

The sad news is that once we all move out — to our brand-spanking-new building over at Spitalfields — they’re going to be demolishing One New Change and putting up a “large scale retail development” – which I think translates as a mall, or thereabouts.

The IT Department are part of the first wave to be leaving, and they’re moving us next weekend. So this coming week is going to be mad with everyone packing up their stuff into crates in preparation for the exodus. I’m going to miss the last two days with being in Oban but I’ll definitely be filing an update once we’re all “moved in”.

Details on the company’s new building (shown above) can be found here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 1st, 2006 at 2:31 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.