Contractor chosen for project’s first phase

Bowmer + Kirkland has been picked to build the first phase of the £80m Leicester Space Park.

Leicester Space Park

Leicester university has chosen the Derbyshire-based contractor for the £14m first phase of the project. 

In a contract award notice published to the Official Journal the university said the scheme, which received planning permission in July, would be built under a design and build contract.

It said: “This procurement is for phase 1, with a net construction cost of £14m, which is a university building of just under 5,000m2 gross internal floor area providing accommodation for teaching, offices and laboratories in two-, three- and four-storey wings linked by an entrance and atrium.”

The project was awarded £13.75m from the UK Research Partnership Investment Fund for the centre.

Architect Shepheard Epstein Hunter designed phase 1 of the project.

The university said it “anticipated and hoped” to secure funding for phases 2 and 3 but said the timing of this funding had not yet been determined.

Bowmer + Kirkland will be in pole position for any subsequent phases, but the university said any appointnment would be “subject to satisfactory performance for delivery of phase 1 among other factors.”

Space Park Leicester will create a new campus to the north of the city centre, close to the National Space Centre.

It will be home to one of the University’s flagship research institutes, the Leicester Institute for Space and Earth Observation.

The space park will also be a new home for the National Centre for Earth Observation and facilities for business collaboration.

Construction at the site is expected to start in the autumn and will be completed by late 2020.