Tony White from Hopkins Architects and Alistair Finn, development advisor and project manager, explain the thinking that informed the design of WWF-UK’s Woking HQ – winner of the Workplace Award at the Test of Time Awards 2025.

Completed in 2013 and rephotographed for the Test of Time Awards by Timothy Soar

The Living Planet Centre (LPC) in Woking was designed in response to WWF-UK’s requirement for a headquarters building that was both environmentally exemplary and publicly engaging, and that embodied the organisation’s broader conservation goals.

The building is raised on a concrete podium above an existing public car park, which needed to be reconfigured and retained. A wide, column-free plan with raised access flooring provides open-plan workspace for more than 300 staff, promoting collaboration while allowing for easy reconfiguration of the internal layout as working practices evolve. Conference facilities and education and exhibition space are available for use by the wider community, as well as the organisation itself. The building is topped by a timber gridshell roof with integrated photovoltaic panels and wind cowls.

The LPC employs a mix of passive and active environmental systems to minimise operational carbon. These include natural ventilation, heat recovery, earth ducts for temperature regulation, and rooftop PVs offsetting a significant portion of emissions. Water conservation is achieved through rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling, and commuting impacts are reduced through a green travel plan. The building is carefully integrated into its ecological context, surrounded by planting and wetlands to support biodiversity and improve the public realm. In use, the centre has delivered substantial reductions in energy, water and waste. It has also significantly improved staff satisfaction and wellbeing, demonstrating the value of investing in sustainable workplace environments.

Designed by Grant Associates, the landscape strategy reinforces habitat links with existing wildlife corridors and the adjacent ancient woodland.

Tony White This was a brownfield redevelopment site, and the design approach was driven by the fact that it contained a 180-space car park. It was imperative that the car park would remain as a car park once the building was finished, so we were necessarily looking at an air rights building that was going to retain that function. The car park is still there, but now floating over it is this magic carpet of the new WWF-UK accommodation, sheltered by a timber gridshell roof. There were various other site constraints to consider. There’s a bridge that links the car park with Woking town centre, and there’s a canal running along the south east side of the building. In addition, there are Sites of Special Scientific Interest off to the other side of the building. So the centre borders woodland, and what was really key was the vegetation and planting that surrounds the building itself. The sustainable urban drainage system uses attenuation from this vegetation and planting, and this part of the project is also important for environmental outreach work, which was absolutely key to the brief. The building was always designed to be accessible to the public and a resource for the local community, so it includes an interactive public exhibition space known as the WWF Experience, which was designed by Jason Bruges Studio.

The LPC sits below the level of the surrounding treetops, while new planting promotes biodiversity and enriches the public realm.

Alistair Finn I’m Alistair Finn from MP2 Consulting. In my previous life, I provided development and project management support to WWF. And for me, the reason this building has been so successful in terms of winning awards – aside from its architectural excellence – is that it’s the best example that I’ve encountered in my career of the design meeting the brief. WWF set out an aspirational brief, and this building captured it brilliantly in terms of both design and delivery. It’s a great example of the triple bottom line – the three Ps: people, planet, profit – because not only does this capture the design excellence, it maintains that income stream for the local authority with the car park remaining below and in use.

Left: View from the mezzanine level. The open-plan, column-free layout encourages collaboration and straightforward reconfiguration as work patterns evolve.
Right: Cone-like timber structures articulate the ground-floor exhibition area.

Tony White We used pre-manufactured components; the diagrid delivered huge benefits in terms of both quality and the speed and efficiency of construction. We used FSC timber for the roof. The project was an early example of the use of phase-change materials. The insitu mezzanine floors are themselves very good in terms of thermal mass, but we used paraffin wax-based phase- change boards for the soffits to further increase thermal mass. The photovoltaics are supplying 20 per cent of the regulated energy that’s used by this building. Airtightness and insulation considerations were key. That thinking is widespread now that Passivhaus has gained traction, but it was less usual at the time.

Alistair Finn It’s worth noting that one of the reasons the project was so pioneering at the time was its approach to whole life costing and carbon analysis. It achieved an innovation credit from the BRE through the BREEAM scheme, where carbon was effectively recognised in addition to the traditional approach of just assessing cost through change control and so on. So it was introduced effectively as a currency, again driven by the client’s brief.

Timber brise-soleils on the gable ends minimise solar gain, while wind cowls located atop the curving zinc roof draw fresh air through the building.

Tony White Following on from some work that we’d done for the Jubilee Campus in Nottingham at the end of the 1990s, we introduced wind cowls to draw fresh air through the building. Earth ducts help to warm incoming air during the winter and cool it in the summer months. Solar shading studies were done to make sure that the extensive glazed areas wouldn’t cause overheating, and to inform the design of the timber brise-soleils on the gable ends. With the combination of rooflights and the shading offered by the structure itself, daylight was demonstrated to be better than four per cent over 90 per cent of the office floor area. There’s an interesting point about the double glazing: it was found that the increased embodied energy of triple glazing outweighed the benefits of enhanced insulation, so there was a saving there in terms of both carbon and money.

Alistair Finn WWF are very proud of their building. Tanya Steele, Chief Executive of WWF-UK at the time, said: “We are proud to have been part of bringing to life a building that is visually stunning and a leading example
of sustainable, low-carbon development. The Living Planet Centre is an incredible place to work in and stands proudly in the heart of Woking as a model not for the future but for the world we need now.” We think the quote stands for itself.

Tony White Back then, WWF were already thinking about working from home and introducing clean desk policies, and not having dedicated individual workstations. So when the pandemic hit, this was something that they were very well prepared for. The building today looks no different. There haven’t been any changes at all.

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