The Client

Founded in 2013 in Borough Market, London, Bread Ahead founder Matthew Jones has successfully opened a number of bakery schools and café bakeries in Chelsea, Soho and now the latest in Wembley.

Home to a vast range of workshops and courses including doughnut workshops, great British baking classes, Nordic and gluten-free baking, Italian, Japanese, French, Eastern European baking and much more, the workshops provide valuable insights into artisan baking at its best.

The latest incarnation, fronted by enormous, double height glass walls, is an 11,000 square foot restaurant, bakery and baking school on Olympic Way in Wembley Park, London.

Inside, visitors will find a pizza and rotisserie restaurant, a bakery offering sourdoughs, regular doughs, pastries and of course doughnuts, and finally a baking school which holds regular classes in their working kitchen, with courses ranging from half-day to three-day full courses.

Project Brief

Following a recommendation and subsequent briefing meetings with Bread Ahead’s project manager, Clive Johnson, Sound Division was asked to provide a multi-zoned, distributed sound system across two floors to include the bakery school classrooms, public dining areas, kitchen, staff and washroom areas. The sound system design includes multiple control and plug-in points for the music system. A further requirement was to supply and fit a large digital signage display in the first floor reception area of the baking school to display welcome messages, showreels and other content.

The client was clear from the outset that they were looking to provide an upbeat environment for staff and customers, and this was to include staff working areas.

System Solution

Sound Division provided a range of loudspeaker solutions depending on the environment and application. The entrance and hallway areas are served by Martin Audio’s flush-fitting C4-8T ceiling loudspeakers, as they offer very wide dispersion, thus requiring fewer units to cover a large area. JBL Control 67 pendant speakers were selected for public serving areas. Chosen as much for aesthetic reasons as for their excellent sound reproduction qualities at a competitive price point, the Control 67s are suspended at a calculated height to provide evenly distributed sound across the area. “The serving/eating area is a vast space with a ceiling height of 7m and a large glazed facade,” explains Sound Division’s David Graham. “The light fittings are suspended, so it made perfect sense to match that look with the loudspeakers. It also worked well from a sound distribution point of view as we were limited in terms of wall space for mounting purposes and the ceiling was too high. The pendant loudspeaker solution neatly solves that problem and looks great into the bargain.”

Finally, for the classrooms on the first floor, Sound Division specified the compact Martin Audio Adorn A55T wall-mount loudspeakers as the optimal solution.

Multiple remote plug-in points, located throughout the ground and first floors, enable presenters and DJs to connect easily to the installed sound system for classes, live demos, presentations etc.

Remote control wall plates offer local control of audio levels and source selection, allowing management and staff at Bread Ahead the control they need in each area without having to return to the centralised rack system.

The Result

According to Clive Johnson of Mentiply Johnson who project-managed the Wembley Bread Ahead project, Sound Division did an excellent job. “They were a pleasure to deal with and delivered the AV systems to specification, to budget and on time. The client is very pleased with the end result, as are we.”

Sound Division’s David Graham agrees. “Excellent communication, planning and coordination resulted in a smooth project from start to finish. It made our job very straightforward, and the finished result delivers exactly what the client wanted: a high quality, multi-zoned distributed system with plenty of access points and local control that enables them to create the upbeat atmosphere they were looking for.”

• Designers: Yard Creative
• Project Managers: Mentiply Johnson
• Main Contractor: Bluecrow Projects
• Electrical Sub-Contractor: J Farley Contracts