It has housed the editorial offices of The Guardian newspaper since December 2008 and is the former headquarters of Network Rail and CGI.

The music, arts and restaurant areas are arranged around public spaces which form a central hub to the building.

Gifted with the performing and back-of-house spaces on a long lease for a peppercorn rent, KPMF aims to deliver a very rich and busy music programme financed by ticket sales and the hire of the Kings Place facilities for rehearsals, recordings and conferences.

The charity works in partnership with music and arts organisations to offer a range of learning and participation activities to the local community and to the wider public.

As well as reducing heat gain from the afternoon sun and increasing wind resistance, the glass wall provides Kings Place with a distinctive facade.

As part of the research that preceded the design, the developer, the architects, the engineers and the project manager visited Japan to look in detail at a dozen concert halls.

The aim was to differentiate very precisely between a variety of modern concert halls and to examine what solution would best meet the requirements of Kings Place.

This breaking down of the mass of the building was critical to the planners and has allowed light and a sense of openness to penetrate to basement level.

Thanks to a series of linking bridges, however, each of the upper floors is experienced by the office user as a very large contiguous plate.

The Kings Place outreach programme works in three areas: Education, Community Engagement and Participation and Family.

Past events and projects have included family drumming workshops and professional development sessions with the London Sinfonietta and their visiting musicians from the Ugandan Dance Academy and a visual arts project with local schools and the Visual Learning Foundation using the construction of the building as inspiration.