Why we chose 88 Wood Street
The thinking behind a specific building
Every new business has a first location. For TOGETHER, that choice carried more weight than it would for most.
The first venue is not just where you open. It is the physical argument for everything you stand for. The space where every claim about how events should feel, how people should be treated, and what responsible operation actually looks like has to become real. Getting it wrong does not just mean a bad venue. It means a brand that cannot point to anything and say: this is what we meant.
Finding the right building was not a quick process. The requirements were specific: the City, accessible to the organisations and teams who would use it most, operating to a sustainability standard consistent with what TOGETHER was trying to stand for, with the physical conditions to run events properly. Not a shortlist of one. A genuine search.
88 Wood Street was not the only option considered. But it became, quickly, the obvious one.
The location argument
The City of London is where most of TOGETHER’s clients already work. Financial services, professional services, law, media, technology companies based between EC1 and EC4. The organisations that run regular off-sites, leadership days, team conferences, and client events are concentrated within a remarkably compact geography.
88 Wood Street puts TOGETHER within ten minutes’ walk of Cannon Street, Mansion House, Bank, St Paul’s, and Liverpool Street stations. That is not a minor logistical point. For a venue hosting day-long events, delegate travel is both the biggest practical friction in the booking decision and the largest single contributor to the event’s carbon footprint. A location that most City workers can reach in under fifteen minutes on public transport removes the first of those problems and significantly reduces the second.
Getting to the venue should not be a conversation. With 88 Wood Street, it is not.
The building’s performance
88 Wood Street holds BREEAM Excellent certification. BREEAM, the Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method, is the most widely used sustainability standard for the UK built environment. Excellent is its second-highest rating. It is not awarded retrospectively. It reflects how the building was designed, constructed, and continues to be operated: energy performance, water efficiency, materials selection, indoor environmental quality, transport, health and wellbeing.
For TOGETHER, the sustainability performance of the building was a condition of the search, not a nice-to-have. A venue that makes claims about responsible operation while sitting in a building that performs poorly against environmental standards is not credible. 88 Wood Street holds the certification that gives those claims a foundation.
The building also contains an 83 square metre living wall. It produces approximately 140 kilograms of oxygen and absorbs approximately 105 kilograms of carbon dioxide annually. It regulates humidity, reduces ambient noise, and contributes to the indoor air quality that research consistently connects to better concentration and lower stress in the people working nearby. It is not decoration. It is part of how the building performs.
The physical conditions for events
The right location in the wrong space would have been the wrong decision. The question was whether Level 1 of 88 Wood Street gave TOGETHER what it needed to run events properly.
Level 1 is built around three distinct spaces. The Pavilion is the main conference floor: 385m², divisible into three rooms, with capacity for up to 500 in theatre or 270 in cabaret. The Collective is a 236m² event and dining space. The Gallery is 450m² of flexible floor for exhibitions, networking, and large receptions. A 9 metre LED wall and fully integrated AV run throughout. Natural light reaches every part of the floor.
For a first venue, the space needed to be able to do everything: large conferences, intimate workshops, dinners, receptions, hybrid events, long days. Level 1 can.
The building was designed by Richard Rogers, whose work includes the Pompidou Centre in Paris. That architectural heritage shows in the proportions: rooms that feel full at different capacities, materials built to hold up over time, and a floor plan that gives the team genuine flexibility rather than a fixed configuration to work around.
The architecture does not guarantee good events. But it provides the physical conditions that make them possible. That matters more than most clients initially realise when they are comparing venues on price and availability.
Level 12
The building also offered something TOGETHER could build toward: Level 12, which will house Club 88, the second phase of the venue, opening September 2026. A different kind of space at a different height, with a different character and a different use case, designed to extend what TOGETHER offers beyond the day-delegate and meeting market into something more distinctly its own.
The fact that the building could accommodate both phases in a way that made operational and brand sense was part of the decision. A venue that grows should grow coherently.
The fit question
Every building TOGETHER considered was evaluated against three questions. Does the location genuinely serve the people who will use it? Does the building’s own environmental performance align with what TOGETHER is committing to? Does the physical space provide what is needed to run events at the standard the brand requires?
88 Wood Street answered all three with specifics, not with potential.
There are other venues in the City. Larger ones. Some with lower day rates. Several with more established reputations. But for a first venue, where the standard set is the one everything else will be measured against, fit mattered more than any of those things. The location, the certification, the architecture, and the potential of Level 12 made this the right building to start in.
TOGETHER opens here in mid-April 2026. Everything that follows begins with this choice.
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