Others working on scheme include Mace and architect HOK

Balfour Beatty is on site building a new covid-19 testing laboratory in Royal Leamington Spa.

Awarded through the Crown Commercial Services framework, the firm is building the new 225,000 sq ft Rosalind Franklin Laboratory for NHS Test and Trace which will be the largest of its kind in the UK.

A multi-disciplinary team led by Mace that also includes design partners WSP and HOK and technical partners Hoare Lea and GMP has also been working on the project.

The Warwickshire centre, which is now partially open, will add hundreds of thousands of tests to the UK’s daily covid-19 testing capacity on completion.

Works include the construction of a series of laboratory ‘lines’ within the facility that will allow for the high volume of tests to be processed.

The projects also include associated welfare and waste management facilities while Balfour Beatty Kilpatrick is M&E contractor on the job.

The laboratory is being built in a modular approach to enable test processing capacity to increase while construction continues. Works is expected to complete later this year.

Inside the Rosalind Franklin Laboratory

Source: HOK

The modular scheme is being built in stages to allow testing to take place while the rest of the site is built out