Sky Meeting Centre’s first birthday

AL_A’s Sky Meeting Centre, “The Hub”, for the international media company celebrated its first birthday on 2 June 2015.

The Hub was the first building to be completed as part of AL_A’s masterplan for Sky’s Media Campus.

One year later, it has fulfilled Sky’s vision for the creation of a space for a new way of working, becoming a “game-changer” for Sky with the introduction of open plan working at every level of the business.

Sky staff working in the building have been described it as having “changed the way that we work”, “stunning”, “the greatest space I’ve ever worked in”, and having an amazing “buzz and vibe in the Hub”.

One member of staff has said “We didn’t expect the importance of the moral boost that this type of space would give my team”, while another noted that “one of the amazing things is the consideration of all of the small details”.

Sky asked AL_A to create a vision for the new Campus that reflected the workings of the organisation and is connected by the assets that drive the business forward: creativity and people. The layout is designed to welcome Sky’s visitors and audiences, revealing the culture and spaces of the business. Food, landscape, amenities and meeting spaces all become intuitive ways of bringing people together, promoting chance encounters across the workforce and the collision of talent across every strata of the business.

Inspired by Sky’s values of transparency and collaboration, the open and flexible spaces of the Meeting Centre are designed in clusters of neighbourhoods to accommodate a new type of creative industry. Traditional distinctions between creative, technical, production and corporate have been broken down by the design.

Maximising natural daylight via predominately north facing roof-lights that minimise the need for artificial light is just one aspect of a highly sustainable building that was awarded a BREEAM Excellent rating.