New Street Square, London, UK

Sector: Buildings - Offices

Cost: £ 193,000,000

Client: Land Securities Plc.

Location: London, UK

Project Details

This new development rising to some 20-storeys in the City of London, forms a landmark by the creation of a New City Square with a campus of high quality offices.· Extensive retail and leisure facilities are proposed to surround the new square; basements are to be constructed for car parking and plant rooms.· The campus style with four independent but linkable buildings offers a variety of floor plates to suit tenants’ various requirements, and provides excellent pedestrian linkages through the development and to the square. The Client’s brief emphasised that the building configurations must be flexible and adaptable to future needs. It provides 62,000sqm of office space and 2,300sqm of retail space.

Occupying a prominent site on New Fetter Lane, the New Street Square development will replace an assortment of 1960s buildings with cutting-edge sustainable architecture. To satisfy the client’s brief for large open spaces, minimum columns and full flexibility for future service, floor plates are designed using Post Tensioned Concrete with flat soffits. The large column-free zones (typically 12m x 9m) allow for the installation of either traditional 4pipe fan coil systems or the more efficient chilled beam or chilled ceiling type systems. The building stability is provided by concrete cores, and the use of pre-cast high strength concrete columns is proposed to speed construction and limit the size and visual impact within the office space. The building will be founded on conventional bored piles. The reused foundations and concrete ‘chilled beam’ helped project achieve BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating.· In addition the project won the London Planning Awards, ‘Best Build Building’ in 2007, as well as being finalist in several other awards such as Building Award, ‘Overall Project of the Year’ in 2009.