IN 1974 Europe’s largest cigarette manufacturing plant was opened by WD & HO Wills at Hartcliffe, near Bristol. The factory, which was capable of producing 120,000 Embassy brand cigarettes an hour, closed after just 16 years, a victim of the squeeze on tobacco sales.

Now Urban Splash, a Manchester-based developer, is about to convert the remaining office building, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, into apartments and what makes the scheme noteworthy is that the entire building will be connected to wi-fi.

“I advise my clients to install wi-fi all the time now because it is such an economical thing to do. My feeling is that it is going to become almost universal over the next three to five years,” says George Ferguson, past president of Royal Institute of British Architects, whose firm has been appointed architects for the Wills development.

At the moment people living in flats can plug into broadband or a local wi-fi system, he says, adding: “But if you have the whole building connected to wi-fi you can go and sit beside the lake. I think it will result in more people working in public spaces.”

He predicts that more and more of us will be working more while sitting on beanbags rather than at desks. The development is not Ferguson’s first attempt at installing wi-fi in a Bristol tobacco factory. He owns a bar and restaurant offering free wi-fi in another former Wills building in south Bristol.

In 1995 he bought the 40,000 sq ft Edwardian, red-brick Wills factory in Raleigh Road to save it from the bulldozers.

Today the tobacco factory is an urban village of performance space, café-bars, exotic restaurants, design companies and loft living. It is also something of a cause célèbre in Bristol, having introduced glass-top tables and designer lighting to an area once dominated by Formica and strip lamps. Thanks largely to the redevelopment, the forgotten area is no longer on the skids.

Ferguson, who lives in one of the loft apartments, is a key part of this success story. Part of the regeneration mix is the free wi-fi in his bar and restaurant which, he says, requires minimal maintenance, needing little more than the occasional reboot.

“It is genuinely convenient and I now get indignant when I cannot just open my laptop and use it, wherever I am.”

With wi-fi and related information technologies fundamentally changing the way we work, the property industry now has the opportunity to lead what amounts to a work revolution. Richard Kauntze, chief executive of the British Council for Offices says: “It is likely that in the future office buildings will become seen as hubs for many workers who will use the building as one of their workplaces.”

For others they will be their main place of activity but the tradition of having their own exclusive space “will be challenged”.

Even listed buildings are starting to succumb to the wireless revolution because they are far easier to adapt to wireless working than to cable, a process that usually involves hacking away at the fabric. In fact, wi-fi is giving some buildings a new lease of life.

The Royal Academy, faced with planning restrictions on Burlington House, its Grade I listed London building and the need to improve the efficiency of its network infrastructure, has installed a wireless local area network to link to its other building on the far side of Piccadilly, speeding up the efficiency of the operation dramatically.

An integrated internet protocol data and voice system offered the most elegant solution as it involved putting the least number of new cables into a listed building.

The academy chose a system from Cisco and the infrastructure links up 180 PCs, 16 wireless access points, 100 fixed-line and three wireless internet protocol telephones across its two Piccadilly sites.

The academy expects to save £250,000 over the next three years, a 100 per cent return on investment in 12 to 18 months, says David Aston, the IT director.