Office fit out in The City EC2
Estate-managed multi-tenant floors where the building’s own fit-out regime is stricter and more decisive than anything the planning authority will ask of you.
What you are fitting out in The City
Large multi-tenant office buildings around Liverpool Street, Broadgate, Moorgate and Bishopsgate, most of them refurbished more than once, with raised floors, suspended ceilings and services distributed to the floor. Behind and between them, smaller period buildings and converted premises with none of the estate infrastructure.
Financial and professional services, insurance, and the technology businesses that serve them. Cat B briefs are specification-led and weighted towards meeting rooms, client-facing reception and acoustic separation, with desk count set by the landlord’s occupancy assumptions as much as by yours.
The constraint that sets the programme
The most controlled on this list, and that is an advantage once it is planned for. Deliveries and waste run through booked goods-lift slots and loading bays managed by the estate team, operatives need security clearance, and noisy work is placed out of hours by the building rather than by you. The programme is therefore written around lift windows, and a fit-out method that removes the demolition phase is worth more here than anywhere — it is the phase that cannot be fitted into a booking.
Who decides, and what needs consent
The City of London Corporation is the planning authority, and it has 28 conservation areas, Bishopsgate among them in EC2. Internal fit-out is rarely a planning matter; what binds is the landlord’s fit-out guide and the licence to alter, and both routinely restrict floor build-ups, structural penetrations and anything fixed to the frame. Read them before designing rather than after.
A fit-out normally answers to three separate things: your landlord’s licence to alter, building regulations where services or fire strategy change, and planning only where the outside of the building or its use changes. They run on different clocks and the licence is the one most often discovered late.
What we are usually asked for in The City
- Cat B fit-out of a multi-tenant floor, phased around occupation
- Reception counters and tea-point runs from our own joinery workshop
- Seamless resin floors laid over the existing screed with nothing sent to a skip
- Acoustic separation between meeting rooms and open plan
- End-of-lease reinstatement back to the Cat A specification in the lease
Partitions, joinery and glazing come from our own companies rather than a chain of subcontractors, which is why the timing and the warranty stay in one place. The low-waste method — refinishing over what is already there — is what makes most of this workable in an occupied building.
How much does the building’s fit-out guide actually control in the City?
More than the planning system does, on a normal internal job. The guide and the licence to alter between them usually govern what you may fix to the structure, how deep a floor build-up may be, which penetrations are permitted, when noisy work may happen, how waste leaves the building and who may be on site. None of that is negotiable late, which is why both documents belong in the hands of whoever is pricing the work before the design is fixed.
A floor area cannot price a fit-out.
We walk the floor, look at what is already there and what can be kept, and tell you what the access regime does to the programme. Free, and it is the only honest way to put a number on The City space.
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