RIBA London awards 2025: Bleeding Heart Yard shortlisted
Bleeding Heart Yard. It sounds like the title of a novel about unrequited love, but it’s actually a place. Charles Dickens mentioned it in Little Dorrit, so it’s immortal, and now it has new notoriety
The building that used to be something else, before someone decided to make it something new, which became old quite quickly, then needed a rethink. That’s architecture for you.
Amin Taha’s GROUPWORK practice got the job, hired by Seaforth Land. The building itself? A relic of the 1970s, squatting on history. Structurally sound, if uninspired. Concrete bones sturdy enough to carry a few more floors, but inside, a maze of half-baked partitions and the ghosts of questionable design decisions. It had got tired fast, and needed a hard reset.
The architects, being these particular architects, did what these architects do. They looked back in time. Hired Donald Insall Associates to find out what used to be here. They also crunched numbers on carbon—BS EN15978, and figured out what to keep, what to jettison, and what might get through planning.
The answer? Keep most of it. Strip away the single-glazed windows and the layers of accumulated nonsense. Wrap the thing in insulation. Stretch it upwards by two stories and outwards with glulam beams and CLT panels. Not, as they say, their first rodeo, Groupwork are excellent at this sort of thing. The result? More space, twice as much. And a new skin, an elaborate act of architectural - elaboration.
Groupwork likes to play with memory. They enjoy tricking people into nostalgia. They’ve done it before—with a ghostly Victorian corner building on Upper Street. Here, at Bleeding Heart Yard, they’ve done it again. They reinstated the old facades, but not exactly. Some entablature is missing. Some columns don’t touch the ground. A metal mesh, just 1.5mm thick, hangs in front, teasing at solidity while dissolving into light. It’s a riddle of a building. A nod and a wink in perforated sheet.
Groupwork call it ‘misremembered, corrupted, and a trick to our nostalgic expectations.’ Some might say it’s clever. Some, perhaps let's just say it's best not to ask, shock of the old/new and all.
Underneath the theatrics, there’s a machine. 250mm of Rockwool insulation. More insulation on the rear and sides. A breather membrane cut like a well-tailored coat. Metal mesh panels ranging from 50mm to 1200mm deep, clinging to brackets like an exoskeleton. New windows, Reynaers, with a U-value of 0.13. Thanks to air source heat pumps, passive controls, and all these clever little tweaks, the building now sips energy instead of guzzling it—just 35kWh/m²/yr, down to a neat 4kgCO2/m²/year over 70 years.
And so, Bleeding Heart Yard has another chapter. Another layer of history, layered on top of the others. Just slightly out of place. Just slightly different. Just as it should be.
