The Poppy Factory charity headquarters, London,
UK, 2016

The Poppy Factory is a direct employer to disabled veterans who produce Remembrance poppies and wreaths for the Royal British legion. Founded in 1922, it has occupied its current site in Richmond since 1925 – a closed-in, semi-industrial area with a complex arrangement of buildings.

The competition brief invited proposals for creating a more inspiring workplace that better represents the charity’s identity and values. Our outline proposal moves production activities to a new purpose-built building where they are integrated into a sequence of interconnected spaces.

The large open ground floor is an expansive interior landscape where activities take place in close proximity, within easy reach and in full view of users, facilitating orientation and social interaction between staff, factory workers, visitors and tenants. A series of simple repeated pitched roofs forms a single roof cover over the entire site, and courtyards are arranged to form a natural sequence of green spaces which allow light penetration across the site.