The building that built itself: Inside Nick Millican’s most ambitious refurbishment project
At 20 Finsbury Dials, Greycoat is turning a 1980s office tower’s own facade into floor tiles—and setting a new benchmark for circular economy development in London
When Nick Millican’s team at Greycoat began stripping the pink granite facade from 20 Finsbury Dials, the stone didn’t go to a landfill. It went to a terrazzo manufacturer. The granite—quarried decades ago, shipped to London, and fixed to a building that once housed J.P. Morgan’s UK headquarters—is being ground down and reconstituted into floor tiles for the same building’s new interior.
It’s a detail that captures something essential about how Greycoat approaches development. The firm, led by Millican since 2012, has built its reputation on refurbishment rather than demolition. But at Finsbury Dials—rebranded simply as DIALS—they’re pushing the philosophy further than on any previous project. The question isn’t just whether you can transform an obsolete 1980s office building into a best-in-class sustainable asset. It’s whether you can do it using the building’s own materials.
The acquisition
In December 2023, Greycoat and Goldman Sachs Asset Management closed the acquisition of 20 Finsbury Dials, a 140,000 square foot office building on a 0.75-acre site just north of Moorgate station. The building—six storeys of late-1980s construction—came with vacant possession, meaning the partners could move immediately to comprehensive refurbishment.
“Our vision for DIALS goes beyond a mere property acquisition,” Millican said at the time. “We are embarking on a journey to transform this 140,000 sq ft space into a beacon of innovation and sustainability. Our approach is not just about being at the forefront of design, but about pushing the boundaries of what is possible in sustainable development.”
The partnership with Goldman Sachs wasn’t new. The two firms had previously collaborated on Procession House, completing a 16-month decarbonisation refurbishment that achieved BREEAM Excellent certification. Chris Semones, Managing Director at Goldman Sachs Asset Management, framed DIALS as an extension of that strategy: “The investment fits into the ongoing trend of transitioning offices from ‘brown to green’ and aligns with our belief that high-quality and sustainable office buildings in London will continue to enjoy strong demand.”
The circular economy approach
The granite-to-terrazzo story isn’t an isolated flourish. According to Solus Ceramics, the specialist working on the material transformation, the project represents a pioneering approach to circular economy construction. Rather than treating demolition waste as a disposal problem, Stiff + Trevillion architects and Creative Director Sam Frith developed a method to incorporate the building’s own fabric into its renovation.
“It’s extremely hard to demolish a building and then use what you’ve taken to then build a new building,” Nick Millican has noted. “It’s not really practical. So the more you can retain, the better the carbon footprint of what you’re doing.” At DIALS, the team is proving that ‘retain’ can mean more than keeping structural elements in place—it can mean finding new uses for materials that would otherwise leave the site.
The results are striking. Waterman Group, which provided structural engineering for both the original 1980s build and the current refurbishment, reports that the project has achieved an embodied carbon metric of 500kgCO₂/sqm—roughly half what a comparable new-build would generate. The firm’s structural solution also released an additional 8% of lettable space per floor through what they describe as “transformative design techniques” with minimal structural intervention.
What DIALS will become
The refurbished building, due to complete at the end of 2025, will offer floor plates of just over 20,000 square feet with floor-to-ceiling heights of around 2.9 metres. A new rooftop terrace and pavilion—dubbed the “Club Room”—will provide additional amenity space. The original five-storey atrium is being infilled using CLT (cross-laminated timber) floor slabs, chosen specifically for their low weight to avoid overloading the existing structural frame and foundations.
The building will be all-electric, with high-efficiency mechanical and electrical systems designed to minimise operational carbon. Capped services on office floors will allow tenants to implement custom fit-outs without major infrastructure interventions—a detail that reflects Millican’s philosophy about how developers should approach workspace.
“As a developer, what we focus on is making sure the bones of the building enable someone to do that,” Millican has explained. “How they occupy the space themselves is largely down to the business themselves, and so what we try and look for is a building that offers flexibility so it appeals to the maximum number of tenants who would occupy it in different ways.”
The certification targets
Greycoat is targeting the full suite of sustainability certifications: BREEAM Outstanding, EPC A, and WELL Platinum. These aren’t just marketing credentials. In London’s increasingly bifurcated office market, they’re becoming prerequisites for attracting the tenants willing to pay premium rents.
“The environmental performance of a project is increasingly important to occupiers, to lenders, to the investor that we’ll inevitably end up selling the building to, once it’s all complete,” notes Dan Higginson, Greycoat’s Director of Development and Leasing. “It’s all part of the rich mix of things that goes into establishing what is best in class.”
Higginson sees DIALS as a proof point for the refurbishment approach more broadly. “I think because it is a very ambitious project for us, it will be really exciting to see how the extent to which refurbishment projects can genuinely deliver on some of these environmental standards. Proof that you don’t necessarily need to build a new building to have it perform in a certain way, you can actually, through sensible intervention and with a bit of thought you can get an existing building to perform.”
The broader significance
Nick Millican has been articulating the case for refurbishment over demolition for years. At DIALS, he and his team are putting the full weight of that conviction into a single project. The building sits three minutes’ walk from Crossrail, in a location that Millican describes as offering “accessibility and quality in the heart of London.” The location was never the problem. The building’s 1980s specification was.
“The transformation of DIALS is a blueprint for the future,” Millican says, “showcasing the immense possibilities of integrating sustainability in urban real estate. Our hope is that this project will inspire a wave of similar initiatives, where environmental stewardship and urban development go hand in hand.”
Whether other developers follow Greycoat’s lead may depend on how DIALS performs commercially. But the technical proof is already emerging. You can take a building designed when sustainability meant nothing more than keeping the heating bills reasonable, strip it to its structural bones, and reassemble it as a best-in-class sustainable asset. You can even, as it turns out, pave the new floors with the old walls.
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