A London architecture practice, founded in 1956, known for airports and railway stations, including Heathrow, Dublin Airport and St Pancras, with a head office in Blackfriars.
Pascall+Watson is an architecture practice that specialises in transport buildings. Wikipedia describes it as one of the largest aviation architecture practices in the world. Its work includes terminals at Heathrow and Dublin Airport, and airports in places as varied as Larnaca, Pulkovo and Nairobi. It has also worked on railway and metro stations, including St Pancras, King's Cross, the London Bridge concourse, Wembley Park tube station and Blackfriars station, which won a RIBA London Regional Award in 2014. Its recent pages also mention education, leisure and hospitality work.
The practice was founded in London in 1956 by Clive Pascall and Peter Watson, and became a limited company in 1983. We did not find a stated mission or values in the pages we read, so we have not invented one. Its own site describes shaping the future of transport hubs, and a news item describes its project record in transport, education, leisure and hospitality. In 2013 it advised the Mayor of London on a hub airport in south-east England, and in 2014 it took on the detailed design of 14 stations on the western section of Crossrail.
The head office is in Blackfriars, London, on the site of the Apothecaries Hall on Black Friars Lane. Wikipedia lists further offices in Dublin, Limerick and Abu Dhabi. The AJ100 ranked it 21st by size in 2019, and it was a finalist for the AJ100 Fastest Growing Practice of the Year award in 2017 and 2018. That award honours firms that have grown turnover and the number of qualified architects by the largest percentage. A trade article has described it expanding in London while closing a Qatar office. We found only one UK location, so London is the main base.
We found little published about the day-to-day culture. The AJ100 award coverage suggests a practice that has grown its team of qualified architects quickly, but the pages we read do not describe values, training or working style, so ask the practice directly if you meet them at an event. An architecture practice listed on a graduate careers website suggests it recruits from universities, but we did not research that further.
Teams in a transport specialist include architects and architectural technologists, masterplanners, interior designers, visualisation and digital staff, and project managers who coordinate with engineers and operators. If you are curious about how millions of people move through a building each day, working on stations and terminals gives you a very different problem to housing or offices, with a heavy focus on wayfinding and flow. See its website for current roles.
Website: www.pascalls.co.uk
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