Past Forward: Reshaping icons, retelling stories
24.09.2025
Written by Mark Goodbrand
Director
Our cities are constantly evolving. Municipal buildings once at their heart and filled with civic pride become redundant with time and without creativity and investment can stand as monuments of a bygone era.
Breathing new life into these iconic buildings is complex in many ways, not least from an engineering perspective. Yet, they lend themselves to the hospitality sector because of their scale, architectural grandeur, and central locations. Their unique character creates a guest experience that new builds simply cannot replicate.
Savills reported that UK hotel investment reached £5.75bn in 2024, more than doubling 2023 levels.
For developers and investors, adaptive reuse offers a way to unlock value from buildings that are obsolete, while tapping into sustained demand for hospitality space.
Over the past 30 years, we've seen how audiences have become more sophisticated, shaped by travel, design, and culture. And how the definition of luxury has shifted with younger, global wealth setting new expectations for places that move beyond tradition.
For us, it's no longer enough to preserve grandeur as a backdrop. Today's icons must be adapted to deliver experiences - immersive, social, and memorable.
They must become destinations in themselves, places that bring new audiences and communities together. That's where our engineering not only preserves and derisks - but becomes a storyteller.
State of the Market
The ideal candidates for conversion
Adaptive reuse in the hospitality sector is inherently complex. From hidden structural conditions, to the balance of heritage and modern brand standards. How do you insert state-of-the-art spas, subterranean ballrooms, and 21st-century services into historic structures without compromising the buildings’ character and integrity?
Elliott Wood has converted a number of large, municipal and heritage buildings into high-end hotels. By working creatively and sensitively with these buildings, we achieve not only embodied carbon savings, but unique hospitality venues rich in history, that contribute significantly to the cultural identity and long-term sustainability of our cities.
Adaptive reuse beyond London
There is much that can be translated from our experience in London to creatively reinvent existing assets in other global cities.
Outside the UK, heritage reuse schemes are particularly strong in continental cities with rich architectural stock. At IHIF Berlin 2024, Marriott International announced its commitment to add nearly 100 properties and 12,000 rooms to its European portfolio through adaptive reuse and hotel conversions by 2026, representing more than 40 percent of the company’s European development pipeline expected to open during that period. Projects span the UK, Spain, Italy, and Turkey, in both the midrange and luxury market.
In the US, according to data from Lodging Econometrics, there are 6,280 projects with 737,036 rooms in the pipeline in Q2 2025. This represents a 3% year-over-year (YOY) increase in both projects and rooms compared to Q2 2024, and an 11% increase in the upscale/luxury pipeline.
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We see the value of retention not just in what is embedded in a structure, but as an act of stewardship that preserves cultural identity, reduces environmental impact and ensures these iconic buildings have a place at the heart of our cities for generations to come.
Transforming historic icons into tomorrow's destinations
A Grade I Listed symbol of London’s trading history on the Thames,
recently granted planning to transform it into a new hotel and public riverside destination.
For decades the building has remained closed to the public. The approved scheme, led by Orms for Jastar Capital, will sensitively restore the building and reimagine it as a 179-bed hotel. The scheme will include bar and restaurant offerings, a new event venue in the historic Long Room, a spa, and riverside terraces.
Importantly, the scheme will open up 160 metres of the Thames Path and create a new 2,880 m2public quayside, reconnecting Londoners to this part of the City for the first time in generations.
Beyond the building’s fabric, the adaptive reuse of Custom House delivers cultural, social, and environmental benefits. Extending the life of the structure brings people back into the heritage building and unlocks a previously constrained part of the City.
The reinvention of the Grade I Listed Midland Bank in the heart of the City, originally designed by Lutyens. Constructed in the1920s, the building is an example of an early steel frame clad with brick and ashlar stone façades. The building was acquired by new owners in 2012 with the intention of transforming it into the Central London space for Soho House.
The project involved the installation of additional floors, a whole new core extending over 12 storeys down to basement -3 and a new swimming pool at roof level.
The existing steel frame is also complex with many transfer structures supporting the upper level frames in a number of locations. These transfer structures had to be checked due to the significant increases in load.
The Northern Line expansion runs under the existing building directly under the new core. This led to the development of a raft solution for the new foundation and required extensive discussions and approvals with both the Bank Station upgrade team and the TfL Asset Protection team.
The transformation of the Grade II* Listed Old War Office on Whitehall into Raffles London at The OWO, a 120-room hotel, 85 Raffles branded residences, nine destination restaurants and three bars.
Principal engineering interventions include a series of rooftop extensions ranging from 1 to 3 storeys, significant internal reconfiguration of the existing building and the excavation of four new basement levels.
The construction sequencing and phasing of the temporary works was a challenge. Through close collaboration with the design team, Elliott Wood proposed a top-down construction process, avoiding excessive new foundation work and eliminating huge amounts of temporary works. This not only minimised impact on the Grade II* Listed historic fabric but delivered programme savings of over six months.
The courtyard is spanned by 26m trusses to provide large, clear span spaces below ground to accommodate the facilities a luxury hotel needs to offer - including a ballroom, spa and wellbeing, swimming pool, kitchens, plant, back of house facilities and a car park. The basement excavation was circa 700,000 cubic ft and the building area increased from 580,000 sq ft to 760,000 sq ft.
Excavating a further 20m below the existing basement level posed complex geotechnical and hydrological engineering challenges. Our civil engineering team derived an innovative subterranean drainage solution to manage the long-term hydrostatic pressure on the underside of the new basement box.
The reinvention of Bow Street Magistrates Court & Police Station into a 5-star hotel and Police Museum. The transformation of the Grade II-listed building included rooftop extensions and numerous isolated alterations to the existing fabric to accommodate the layout of the 91 room hotel.
The works involved rooftop extensions to the existing structure and numerous isolated alterations to the existing fabric to accommodate the proposed layout of the hotel and the construction of an 8 storey reinforced concrete framed extension within the courtyard of the existing building.
The new extension involved a two-storey basement, which required underpinning of the existing building.
