Steve Watts to join US bank as cost and commercial MD on Fosters-designed scheme
Alinea co-founder Steve Watts has become the first high-profile name to land a key role on JP Morgan Chase’s plan to build a new headquarters building in Canary Wharf.
Watts helped set up the then fledgling London cost consultant in 2013 in the aftermath of Aecom’s takeover of Davis Langdon along with five other former Davis Langdon partners, before it was bought by Turner & Townsend a decade later and rebranded T&T Alinea.
Watts, who was also a long-standing chair of the Council on Tall Buildings, said that he was leaving the firm this summer and joining JP Morgan as its cost and commercial managing director for the building at Riverside South.
JP Morgan’s global head of real estate David Arena has been a regular visitor to London from his New York base since JP Morgan announced its plan to build a new European headquarters in Canary Wharf last November.
Building understands Arena has been putting together a team to build the tower designed by Foster & Partners with Watts the first high-profile recruit.
No details of how tall the tower will be or what it will look like have been released but it is understood Fosters had originally come up with three options and what is known is that it will run across three million sq ft and be home to 12,000 employees while flight path regulations in the area mean it cannot be more than 265m high.
Watts said he was leaving a lineage that stretches back almost 30 years when he joined Davis Langdon in 1997 because “I have been given the opportunity to work on the biggest real estate project in the UK, if not Europe”.
Earlier this year, Building revealed that Gardiner & Theobald had been appointed to a cost consultancy role on the scheme. The firm has been helping out with early feasibility work although that is understood to have now finished.
Canary Wharf Group, which is helping develop the tower, has its own framework of cost consultants for the site which comprises T&T Alinea, Mace, Atkins and Exigere.
The cost of the JP Morgan scheme has been put at £10bn and will be built on the Riverside South plot that was due to be developed by the bank nearly 20 years ago before being put on hold because of the financial crash.
JP Morgan then moved into a building on the estate previously occupied by failed Wall Street bank Lehman Brothers, paying £495m for the site in 2010. It also leases space at 1 Cabot Square.
But, according to insiders, the bank, which also has a site at Victoria Embankment near Blackfriars, is “bursting at the seams” at its 25 Bank Street site and settled on Riverside South after looking at locations in both the City and Canary Wharf.
London tower builders have put the plans on their radar with JP Morgan understood to be mulling whether to use contractors like Mace and Multiplex for the job – or stick to Canary Wharf Contractors which has carried out much of the building work at the Docklands estate over the years.
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