The first year students on the BSc Real Estate Management visited London Guildhall and the City of London on Friday 31 October 2014. The field trip is part of the first year Integrative Project which provides a background to the subjects that they study in the first year. The module encourages students to question the value of the heritage of the built environment and how they think about space, place and design and links this overview with the economic, legal and social systems that produced or revived the different types of architecture and town planning which helped shape the built environment.
The trip also introduced the students to the City of London which is one of the leading financial centres in the world, partly due to it's location, but also due to the activities of the City of London Corporation who have maintained a supply of Grade A office and trading space against the threat of other locations (such as Canary Wharf). Today, architects who are commissioned to deliver new office space face considerable challenges if they are going to respect the history of the City and also meet the challenge of the City's constrained plots and patterns. As a result, the City is starting to spill outwards beyond traditional boundaries, towards Spitalfields and Southwark (with the development of the Shard).
To introduce the students to the area, Mike Stubbs had organised a tour on a vintage Routemaster bus, taking in the City, Hoxton, Shoreditch and Southwark (photos by the Ed).
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| The vintage Routemaster departing from Guildhall |
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| Looking through the City to the Pinnacle |
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| Shoreditch |
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| Via Hoxton |
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| On the way back to the City |
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| Approaching the City from Southwark |
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| Entering the City via the Barbican |
The students then returned to the Guildhall for a series of presentations from GVA (Daryl Perry -Senior Researcher, Alastair Mant - Head of Sustainability and Munish Vaswani - Sustainability Consultant) about energy efficiency, sustainability and office design and the City of London office market and in particular, the five buildings listed below:
Whilst grabbing a bite to eat, the students walked around and researched the development sites they had been allocated to consider in terms of: architecture, construction, heritage, urban design, sustainability and ability to meet market trends. These findings would feed into coursework for the module back at Oxford Brookes.
Tate Modern and the Tate Modern Extension.
No 1 Poultry
Lloyds of London
Aldermanbury Square
Bankside 123
Bankside
Paternoster Square
Broadgate
The day complete, it was back to the coaches for a well-earned rest (and a lot of napping) during the return trip to Oxford.
And finally, the film of our journey:
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