Alison Brooks Completes 163-Flat Cadence Court at King's Cross

Alison Brooks Architects has completed Cadence Court, a 163-apartment mixed-use block in London's King's Cross, with two-storey-tall arched entrances and towers reaching 16 storeys.

The red-brick building sits at the northern end of Lewis Cubitt Park and forms part of the wider King's Cross redevelopment. It looks south toward Heatherwick Studios' Coal Drops Yard.

According to studio founder Alison Brooks, the red-brick exterior pays homage to nearby St Pancras Station. The arched openings draw on the area's gothic architecture and were conceived as a "civic welcoming gesture".

"The main concept of the project was to make a clear statement of welcome and arrival in King's Cross, but from the north end of the master plan rather than the south end, which everybody is familiar with," Brooks told Dezeen.

"The generous two-story-high arches were the first instinct to make this very civic welcoming gesture and then there's the idea of the arches creating a really animated silhouette," she added.

How is the building organised?

Cadence Court is a five-sided block with no designated front or back. It rises into two towers of 12 and 16 storeys respectively.

At the centre of the angular plan, an open-air courtyard with a reflecting pool is wrapped by sheltered walkways. These provide shared circulation between the private and commercial programmes.

"It's a multifaceted building," Brooks said. "Each facet of the pentagon has a particular identity or address to the space that it's adjacent to."

"This idea of making a very connected space at the base of the building, even though it's a courtyard, is visually trying to connect all the sides of the plot to the city around it."

She added: "It's a place of movement and light and also a kind of special quality because of the reflecting pool."

The first two floors hold 633 square metres of commercial and social spaces. These include a "community living room" opening onto the courtyard at ground level. A prefabricated lift system connects the upper floors, where all 163 residential units get both courtyard and street views.

What does prefabrication change here?

The studio used a Design for Manufacture and Assembly approach (a method where building components are produced off-site then assembled on location). That meant 85 per cent of the building's components were prefabricated off-site — a figure that shortens construction timelines and cuts on-site waste, and signals how Brooks's practice is scaling housing delivery.

Inside, rectangular and arched windows draw daylight into the white-walled interior. Private balconies and communal roof terraces complement the mix.

Who delivered it?

The full consultant team:

• Architect: Alison Brooks Architects
• Client: King's Cross Central Limited Partnership
• Landscape: Todd Longstaffe-Gowan / Bradley-Hole Schoenaich Landscape
• Interior design: Conran & Partners
• Structure: Ramboll UK
• Services: Hoare Lea
• Cost: Faithful + Gould
• Lighting: Speirs + Major

Cadence Court joins other projects in the King's Cross regeneration, including Google's landscraper office by BIG and Heatherwick, and a Coffey Architects office block recalling the area's industrial spaces. Its completion anchors the master plan's less-familiar northern edge — and gives the 67-hectare district a brick-built marker that echoes the Victorian railway heritage the whole redevelopment trades on.