The Plimsoll Building has played a vital part in establishing the Gasholder Park residential neighbourhood, in the heritage heart of King's Cross. Its two schools bring an amenity for local families, and create daily footfall in the area, as well as the sense that it is now a 'real' place. The 14 storey building provides 178 open market apartments and 77 key worker apartments located above the King’s Cross Academy, a two form entry primary school, Frank Barnes School for Deaf Children, a nursery and community facilities. The complex adjacencies of co-located schools and community facilities are resolved in a very flexible way by arranging them over two storeys at the base of the building. The building above is conceived as a cluster of domestic scaled towers arranged around a central garden. The footprint extends to the edge of the site and helps to define the emerging new streetscape. The schools themselves are arranged around an internal top-lit street which allows each school to have its own identity but also to benefit from a core of central shared facilities. The classrooms are mainly at first floor around the perimeter with generous bay windows to capture as much daylight as possible. An inclusive design approach enables both deaf and mainstream school children to benefit from shared facilities including sound field in every classroom. Generous circulation spaces to enable signing, curved corridor corners, glazed screens and straight staircases all add to the comfort for deaf children.