A first look inslide new Newcastle office space The Pattern Shop
The Pattern Shop, a new office space in the heart of Newcastle's Stephenson Quarter has been completed as part of a regeneration project in the area. The building is the first of the development to be completed with additional office and living spaces expected in the future.
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00:00 Come with us as we take a look inside a new multi-million pound office space set to open in the heart of Newcastle.
00:07 The Pattern Shop behind Central Station is where Robert Stephenson built and exported steam engines around the world in the late 1800s,
00:14 putting it at the heart of the industrial revolution, and it's taken a lot to get the space up to shape.
00:20 Yeah, so this is the Pattern Shop and this is the first phase of Founders Place, which is our site-wide brand for this plot and the next four plots to come forward.
00:31 So they look like a lot of new office buildings, but real mixed use as well, so we've got some residential and some food and beverage leisure uses to come forward as well.
00:43 So it'll be a real city centre area where people can work, live and play all at once.
00:49 It's fantastic, we're really proud of it. Like I say, a few challenges to get here and a strange office market over the past few years,
00:58 but we think we've done the building justice, which is part of our job.
01:05 And yeah, now we can use this as a building to kind of host events and when it's not being used as an office space,
01:15 we can host events to the public, workshops, that kind of thing, and kind of start to build the community and have it as a community asset.
01:23 It's a phenomenal achievement. Of course it's a team effort, but we've seen it right the way through from a transition shell into a building site and now a completed project.
01:36 So of course it marks something really quite important.
01:40 The challenge with any conservation project, a listed building, is to make the original building and the reason it's important shine through when you overlay it with contemporary nature for a new use.
01:52 And all the component parts of that are available to us in the packing shop, whether it be the brickwork, the cast iron columns, timber trusses,
02:02 some of the changing shape and nature of the project over its original use, where it's grown in size, it's changed shape,
02:10 all have been managed to be held onto as we layer it with insulation and a proper heating system for the first time ever really,
02:20 and bring it into use as a good contemporary workspace.
02:24 Well the challenge is not insignificant, but some of them were easy.
02:30 So the brickwork itself is robust, it's structurally sound, it's fairly easy to hold onto all of the nooks and crannies that they offer.
02:39 Some of the harder ones are the timber, because timber obviously suffers with decay and water and grass, so some of that's been lost, but an awful lot has been kept.
02:49 So I'm pretty pleased that overall we've managed to hold onto the soul of the building in its now brand new current form.