Havering Town Hall is a 1930s building providing accommodation for the majority of the Council’s operational staff. As part of a consolidation onto one central site, our renovation encourages better health and well-being, improves staff experience and retention rates, and increases capacity for better use of the estate.

The refurbished Town Hall has a new and improved reception and customer service centre, with comfortable and safe consultation rooms. It enables agile and collaborative working, supports smart working principles and a new IT system.

A key design element is encouraging activity-based working, in which staff make shared use of a diversity of work settings that have been designed to support different kinds of activities. Each activity zone includes a range of carefully selected furniture.

We worked with the council and a local supplier to select a range of furniture and space types – a ‘kit-of-parts’ to be utilised throughout the building. This design approach allows for consistency in design; the same workspace strategy can be easily adopted and applied to other areas of the Town Hall refurbishment in the future.