111 SALUSBURY ROAD

111 Salusbury Road was one of the early office/employment based projects ROHA worked on in Queens Park in north west London. Predominantly a residential area, during the 1980s and 90s the high street (Salusbury Road) had lost most of its ‘essential’ shops such as greengrocers, butchers, bakers, bank etc and consisted mostly of convenience stores, takeaways and estate agents.

No cafes, restaurants, not even even a pub. It was clear that what the high street needed was an influx of day time visitors, and this would be provided by employment uses.

111 Salusbury Road was the first of a number of employment generating uses introduced to the high street that transformed Queens Park over the next decade.

This ‘land locked’ site with only a frontage to the high street and a rear view of Paddington Cemetery was designed around a central atrium. With clever fire engineering by LWF the atrium was also used as the primary means of escape, saving on the space that would have been occupied by additional staircases and corridors. The fit out of the building was for Corbis, a digital photographic archive founded by Bill Gates.