SKY BiBB Plaza and Grant Way

The Osterley Landscape is the next stage in transforming the campus, building on the award winning success of SKY Central, and integrating the new SKY Labs and surrounding gardens. The design vision is to enhance the campus setting and improve pedestrian comfort, safety and overall experience, including enhancing the campus landscape to the Gatehouse entry along Grant Way, greatly increasing soft green areas by circa 2,000 sq m with 79 new trees.

The new BiBB Plaza functions similarly to a university quadrangle, creating a central campus destination and orientation point. Currently used as an entry space for flagship buildings including Sky Studios and Sky News, the space will be transformed as part of the URBAN led landscape vision for the campus. From this, a distinctive and orderly space has been designed to improve movement and connectivity, recover good quality views from other parts of the campus, simplify complex infrastructure, and create more potential for campus programming and events.

In complementing paths and essential routes, modest areas of hard-standing provide space for café spill out, kiosks, hosting events or broadcasting. A new lawn running through the space maintains an openness and creates opportunity for further functions and use, whilst its planting envelope creates dramas and colour, scent and movement throughout the year. A key feature of the plaza will be a large specimen tree acting as a wayfinding tool between the campus entrance and SKY Central, with a circular seat beneath supporting this natural meeting point.