A Look Inside Trainline’s New London Office

Travel platform Trainline hired workplace design firm Oktra to design their new office in London, England.

“Trainline originally occupied two floors within their building before taking an additional floor to help support their shift to a more agile workspace. The existing office layout wasn’t working for their people so our design team set out to improve the space with a Cat A and Cat B fit out of the new floor that would use the space to its full potential.

We had the opportunity to get under the skin of the business and take a close look at their ways of working and understand how they work day-to-day. We ran workshops and feedback sessions with their staff to get a sense of the challenges they faced in their office and how we could enhance their space.

Having worked in the building before, we knew the potential of the space. After listening to staff, we observed the space and looked to see where we could add value. With the addition of the sixth floor, we had the opportunity to remodel the space to improve its functionality.

To improve the space utilisation, we shifted all the functional spaces such as the meeting rooms and whiteboard spaces to the inside of the property. This allowed us to position staff around the perimeter of the working floors to ensure they had the prime real estate with access to natural light.

After we analysed the way the Trainline staff used the office, we could see that certain areas were receiving heavy footfall and other areas had become closed off and isolated. Our solution to unlock the full potential of the office space was to remove one desk from the end of each row.

This was an uncomplicated design solution but this enabled us to create a secondary circulation route through the office and give access to the window bays. The window bays were prominent features in the building but had become cut off from the rest of the office and served as ideal spaces for individual workspaces. By making these small adaptations, we were able to create additional workspaces on each floor without building any partitions.

Following our staff engagement sessions, we had developed a strong understanding of how their people worked and the types of spaces they required.

We installed 50 types of agile workspaces per floor, all within close proximity of the main working floors. These include spaces such as high benches, meeting rooms, individual desks and informal spaces which are designed to support the different ways of working in the office.
These changes allowed us to triple the number of meeting rooms in the office from 20 to 60. This increase came from introducing new types of meeting room which catered for smaller and larger occupancies. Rather than having three people in a 10-person meeting room, we reallocated that space in multiple, lower occupancy rooms to better support the way staff used meeting space.”