From curry house to modern office: How Northeastern transformed a dockside restaurant into a staff hub
Rob Farquharson, chief executive of Northeastern University in London, explains how Marble Quay went from an Indian restaurant to a high-tech workspace.
LONDON — The mail room of Northeastern’s London staff hub would have once been filled with the sound of curries cooking, naan breads being slapped into shape and kebabs sizzling on the grill.
That’s because the building used to be a 200-seat curry house.
Situated with a view of St Katherine Docks, Marble Quay today is home to faculty, Ph.D. students and professional staff at the university. But before the school transformed it into a modern working space, it was formerly Mala restaurant, an Indian brasserie.
“The restaurant was on the ground floor and kitchens were in the basement,” says Rob Farquharson, chief executive of Northeastern University in London.
Mala opened in the dockside building in 1987 but moved to new premises several years ago after more than 30 years, leaving an empty space behind.
The departure proved perfect timing for a growing university, says Farquharson, as Northeastern sought to create more teaching space.
For the 2021-22 academic year, Northeastern moved from a building in Bedford Square in central London to Devon House on St Katherine Dock in the east of the city. The move saw the university go from occupying 7,000 square feet to a 38,000-square-foot property, with staff and students all based on site.
“When we arrived, we thought, ‘This is huge, we will never fill it,’” recalls Farquharson. But with the number of students coming from the U.S. to study increasing rapidly, there was a push to convert Devon House fully into classrooms and study space.
“We actually needed to move faculty and staff out of Devon house to free up that space and thought, ‘Where can we go?’” Farquharson explains.
“And Marble Quay just screamed, ‘Go here.’ It was just around the corner and it was empty at the time. We negotiated with St Katherine Docks to do that, but obviously, when you went in, you could tell it had been a restaurant.”
The task then was to bring in contractors who could produce a new vision for the space.
Management of the docks had started to advertise the former restaurant site as available for use as office space, with the kitchen, including its tandoori clay oven, already having been ripped out, along with other features of the old eatery. But its internal restaurant layout was still there to see, remembers Farquharson.
The Boston-based Planning, Real Estate, and Facilities team came in to work with local designers, who helped shape the plan for turning all five levels of Marble Quay into a Northeastern building.
The former restaurant entrance was transformed into a staff kitchen area, the raised dinning level was made into a boardroom, and the old chef’s kitchen became a mail room and storage location.
When the building opened to Northeastern staff in 2023, rows of added desks replaced banqueting tables covered in white linen on the ground floor. The bar area had been switched out for communal hotdesks, and new, high-tech meeting rooms and private booths had been installed. Overall, the renovation doubled the available desk space for staff.
Last year, Northeastern opened another building on the London campus in the form of One Portsoken, giving staff a whole new location to work from, with arguably even greater views of the city. But that’s another story in itself.