Contractors on alert as British Land unveils latest Broadgate work with £250m office plan

British Land has unveiled the latest proposals for its ongoing makeover of its Broadgate campus with a £250m plan to overhaul an eight-storey office that dates to the 1980s.

The developer’s recent projects at the site include Make’s 5 Broadgate, built by Mace, and Hopkins’ 100 Liverpool Street completed by Sir Robert McAlpine.

McAlpine is already on site with AHMM’s 1 Broadgate, worth around £300m, and is expected to start on site later this year with a tower at 2 Finsbury Avenue designed by Danish practice 3XN.

Now British Land has submitted proposals to City planners by Piercy & Company to strip a 1980s office building back to its core and extend it upwards.

The scheme is set to have a construction cost of £250m with the developer understood to have begun preliminary soundings with contractors about the job.

The current building was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and backs on to the grade II-listed Liverpool Street Station shed and the Exchange Square outdoor area.

As well as adding extra storeys to the current structure, the practice’s plans extend the building’s floorplates closer to the site perimeter. Under the proposals, balconies would be provided on the new building’s eastern façade and there would also be a rooftop pavilion and terrace.

A statement from planning consultancy DP9 said the current building at 1 Appold Street was lower than all other buildings surrounding Exchange Square – with the exception of the station which is set to undergo a £1.5bn revamp by Sellar.

“The proposed height and massing would respond positively to the scale of the neighbouring commercial developments, which comprise the western edge of the square, resulting in a more consistently scaled framing of the public realm,” it said.

The statement said the “gently curving façades” of Piercy’s proposed east and west elevations added “visual interest” and would respond positively to the building’s surroundings. It said the eastern elevation was inspired by Liverpool Street Station, while the Appold Street elevation was “reflective of the prominent bend in the road”.

DP9 said the project team planned to retain “the majority” of the current building’s existing primary structure, basement and foundations.

In its design and access statement for the project, Piercy said it had explored the possibility of retaining the current building’s façades.

But it said the approach would have been an obstacle to creating new active frontages at ground-floor and upper levels, and that all the building’s windows would have needed to be replaced to meet modern performance requirements and its external walls would have required “extensive upgrading”.

Piercy said the result would have been that just over half of the current façades needed to be replaced.

British Land’s team includes project manager Opera, quantity surveyor Core 5, AKTII as structural and façade engineer, and DSDHA as landscape architect.

The proposals are open to public consultation until 3 February.

Additional reporting by Dave Rogers