Winner for £150m Shaftesbury Avenue job due this autumn
The race for the third major office job in London being masterminded by Dutch developer Edge is down to two firms.
Mace, which is coming to the end of a £250m scheme to build a 28-storey tower for Edge at London Bridge and last month won the £200m Edge Liverpool Street scheme, is now out of the running leaving Bovis and Sir Robert McAlpine to square up for the £150m deal at 125 Shaftesbury Avenue in the West End.
Bovis has recently picked up a couple of schemes since being rebranded earlier this year, including a job at 60 Gracechurch Street in the City for Sellar, while McAlpine is hoping to bounce back after the blow of missing out on the £700m British Library deal earlier this month – won by Mace.
A winner is due this autumn with the job being handled by Luxembourg-based client VREF Shaftesbury Avenue, a joint venture between Edge and Mitsubishi Estate.
Architect DSDHA’s scheme, which was approved earlier this year, will modernise a brick-faced office block built in 1982 which is currently vacant above the ground floor.
The scheme has undergone a redesign, with a new planning application being submitted in late 2024 six years after a previous set of proposals for former site owner Almacantar were approved by the council but never started.
Almacantar sold the site in 2023 to Edge and Mitsubishi, which embarked on a more sustainability-focused rethink after reviewing how office occupier expectations have changed since the pandemic.
Changes include the addition of a new light-filled atrium, the widening of a pedestrian route through the site and the retention of existing floor slabs to reduce embodied carbon emissions.
A draft construction management plan drawn up by Waterman as part of the new application proposed enabling and demolition works starting on site this month with construction completing in summer 2028.
Edge and Mitsubishi retained much of the previous scheme’s project team, including cost consultant Gardiner & Theobald, civil and structural engineer AKT II, planning consultant Gerald Eve, daylight consultant GIA and transport consultant Waterman. MEP engineer Long & Partners and lift consultant D2E were both replaced by Sweco.
Almacantar had originally considered building a 30-storey tower on the site but opted for a refurbishment of the existing building after concluding a high-rise scheme would have been “inappropriate” for the area.
No comments yet