Barclays Rise, London

Rise London, created by Barclays, brings together a carefully curated community of forty FinTech companies, along with Barclays’ corporate clients and other experts, to work on Barclays’ customer and business opportunities to help create the future of financial services.

Having shown a proven track record of delivering a number of quality co-working spaces, Area were tasked with delivering Rise London as a design and build process.

Consisting of seven floors, two balconies and four mezzanines, Rise London provides a number of working opportunities for the communities who work within it. The facility features a state-of-the-art auditorium and presentation space on the lower ground floor, a fully functioning café on the ground floor, a high-specification executive meeting suite, and a suite of innovation laboratories.

Harbouring an existing strong brand identity, we worked closely with Barclays’ in-house design team to deliver the right look and feel that remained consistent with other Rise locations, whilst working to a restricted budget. This was achieved by careful value engineering, negotiations with the supply chain, and a series of design workshops with the client to refine what they required.

A key project challenge was having to make fundamental changes to the base build to accommodate the occupancy level that Barclays required. We worked closely with building control to ensure the right changes were made to allow this. Additionally, delivering the project within a tight timescale, whilst an accelerator space was kept running in the middle of the workspace, was also a challenge. This was overcome with close co-ordination between the project team and the client.

The client’s passion and forward-thinking vision for Rise London inspired the project team to deliver an outstanding FinTech co-working space. The project’s success and the great relationship that developed over the project course has resulted in Area being appointed to complete Barclays’ next Rise project in Manchester.