Five ascending concrete building cores, stencilled with Android logos, pronounce ‘On Our Way!’ Seemingly, these inscriptions anticipate the imminent arrival of Google’s enormous new UK headquarters. Costing £1 billion, it is a 1000-footlong ‘landscraper’ that will, alongside nearby existing offices, eventually bring nearly 7,000 ‘Googlers’ to London. Designed by Heatherwick Studio and Bjarke Ingels Group, the building undulates up a gentle incline, featuring a ‘natural theme’ with materials sourced through Google’s healthy materials programme. Its interior will hold many features now expected in tech company offices: a multi-use sports hall; a swimming pool; an auditorium. On its roof, an outdoor running track will be set into an expansive sloping rooftop garden. The facility – says Google in its press release – will ‘ensure the health and wellbeing of staff and foster the innovation and creativity that defines the organisation.’

Like iconic media buildings past, Google’s new UK HQ not only crystallises a corporate culture, but the indelibility of platforms for contemporary urban regeneration. The building is a pivotal element in one of London’s largest urban redevelopment sites. Once home to gasworks, railways and heavy industry, this 67-acre area north of King’s Cross Station is being developed by a single landowner (King’s Cross Central Limited Partnership) into a comprehensively planned ‘cultural’ or ‘knowledge’ quarter, branded ‘KX’.

In the eyes of architecture critics, urban designers and property developers, KX’s aesthetic, which mixes old and new, is the redevelopment’s most notable quality. Industrial heritage is prominently showcased: a curated retail area has been built into an old coal drops yard; a greenspace set within the wrought-iron shell of rebuilt gasworks; and a design school incorporated into the expansive premises of a former granary.

But another quality has not escaped the attention of observers and commentators: the remarkable extent to which the area has become a locus for digital platform and technology companies. Alongside Google is Facebook, which – in London’s most significant property deal in the last decade – acquired 611,000 square foot of office space, representing 15 percent of the rentable space available in the entire development, enough to host at least 6,000 workstations. Samsung has set down its own roots with a 20,000 square foot ‘brand showcase’ – also designed by Heatherwick Studio – promising to ‘bring the latest technologies to life with curated experiences’. DeepMind Technologies, a UK artificial intelligence firm now owned by Alphabet, has recently opened a new, custom-designed headquarters. Another Alphabet holding, YouTube, moved into the area four years ago, opening a dedicated ‘creator’ space similar to those in other global cities, hosting events, training and production facilities.

In some ways KX looks like another example of media driven gentrification. But if so, it doesn’t quite fit the traditional model. London’s media and cultural quarters tended to take shape incrementally, often around squares such as Fitzroy Square (art and design), Leicester Square (theatre and cinema), Soho Square (film and television), Golden Square (advertising), or Hoxton Square (arts and new media). KX’s symbolic hub, Pancras Square, is more carefully planned and orchestrated, its addresses laid out with attention to symbolic (and saleable) value. The architecture of the wider development is well-judged, too, with subtle (and not-so-subtle) nods to industrial heritage. The restaurants, bars and shops of KX are a carefully curated mix of higher status chains, boutique shops and notable second locations of well-known London institutions, such as Honest Jon’s record store, or Lina Stores Italian food products.

KX is quickly becoming London’s home to platform companies, but is it also its own kind of platform? Something akin to how Benjamin Bratton describes digital platforms, pulling together disparate elements into an umbrella space of value-generation?[1] ‘KX’ may be easy enough to dismiss as just another tasteless place brand, but it is more than an offhand moniker. It comes out of an elaborate place-branding strategy, one clearly aiming to establish spatial coherence, identity and value. More than a mere name, it is a suite of design elements, deployable within and across environments: signage, logos, online apps using ‘KX’ as well as ‘Kings Cross’. The developer have even taken to publishing both a neighbourhood newspaper, KX Quarterly, and the more learned KIOSK, a collection of ‘neighbourhood essays’. Whether this approach to assembling a new neighbourhood aligns in some functional way with the qualities, ideals and requirements of digital platforms remains an open question. But KX does appear to embody a kind of platform-ready regeneration.