Labour Party HQ moves 125 metres to Rushworth Street

Earlier this year we reported that the Labour Party had returned its headquarters to Southwark, moving from Victoria to Blackfriars Road.

This autumn the party upped sticks again and swapped the busy Blackfriars Road for the quieter back streets of Southwark.

The party's headquarters is now in the Southworks building in Rushworth Street.

The new offices are a mere 125 metres due east of the old ones, on the opposite side of the Friars Primary School site.

Luke Akehurst, a member of Labour's national executive committee, blogged in the summer that the Rushworth Street offices are "suitable both for the General Election and a party in government" and would be "cheaper, bigger, and of higher quality and specification". 

The Southworks building sits on the site formerly occupied by Friars Court, a light industrial complex dating from the 1980s.

In their 2017 planning application, architects SPPARC said they had "adopted innovative architectural techniques to generate the original design concepts for the site that reflect and take influence from the heritage context of the surrounding street pattern and in particular the articulation of the grade II listed Ripley Buildings to evolve an architectural composition of beauty and merit while respecting and responding to the inherent limitations of the location".

The Southworks office block was developed by Taylor Wimpey in lieu of a previously consented residential scheme that would have seen 47 homes - including 12 affordable homes - built on the same site.

Rushworth Street is named after 17th century MP John Rushworth who served as personal secretary to Oliver Cromwell after the English Civil War and who spent the last years of his life in Southwark's King's Bench Prison.