When I first came to Broadgate I realised that with enormous amounts of
construction going on, on several projects at the same time, the propensity
for chaos was huge.
The opportunity that McAlpine have had here is to actually be
really innovative in the things that we're doing, so it's: OK yes we
need to communicate with people, we need to engage with people, we need to work in
partnership - but how can we do that in a different way? - and I think for McAlpine,
to have us on board, we do have that kind of vision.
This is a major feat of
engineering that's going on here at 100 Liverpool Street and what
we're going to see shortly with the Fulcrum being lowered makes me very, very
proud to be part of and leading this team.
What we did was think about how
Broadgate was originally developed as a best-in-class campus in the 1980s and
really how after 30 years that needed to adapt and to change.
We're now in a position where we can lower the Fulcrum - 10mm by 10mm, on eight jacks, using hydraulics.
With all the public walking past and the risks involved... this is
something we cannot get wrong.
Broadgate was a campus that was developed in the 1980s in response to Big Bang.
It was developed on the edge of the City of London, the areas around it
hadn't quite improved to the extent they have today and the campus comprised
primarily office accommodation.
What has really happened over the last 20 years
areas like Spitalfields to the east, Shoreditch the north where the tech
sector has grown and Old Street roundabout have come up tremendously and
that's changed the context of Broadgate.
100 Liverpool Street is a scheme that
came about at the end of 2016 when UBS were moving out of this building that
they've been in for about 30 years since it was first built, into their new
headquarters at 5 Broadgate.
When we became custodians of the campus it
was all offices, and we realised that in order to keep pace with the demands of
the market we would have to be creating a much more mixed-use destination.
We normally sum-up the Broadgate vision with a single sentence which is to
"transform the Broadgate neighbourhood into a world-class, mixed-use, seven-day,
central London destination" - and it would be good if we could measure 100 Liverpool Street
against those objectives.
Beneath the building we have 90,000
square feet of new retail accommodation, of food and beverage - again expanding the
facilities here at Broadgate, meeting this pent-up demand there is here from
our customers for new facilities and feeding-off what is a tremendous
footfall of 25 million people a year alone come through this mall beneath us
from Liverpool Street Station, feeding into Broadgate and into the circle
that we see behind us now.
On top of that we're providing new office
accommodation, new flexible accommodation, meeting again the changing needs of our
customers who are in this "war for talent" - they need to have best-in-class office
space to attract people to come and work for them and 100 Liverpool Street
will absolutely provide for that.
To a company like British Land and with Sir Robert
McAlpine, the approach to big complex projects like this, sometimes
it can be a bit business-as-usual, but it's actually fiendishly complicated.
So we've got a variety of interfaces that are really, really challenging.
We're on top of the Liverpool Street Station, so we have Network Rail there as the people
who own and operate the station, we've also got TfL (Transport for London) - and TfL in two
main guises really. Firstly there's Liverpool Street Bus Station which we've had to have close
and relocate during construction and also as Crossrail - we've had to get into
the site, demolish, and get out before Crossrail started to deliver the glass box
above the station. So they were really, really challenging interfaces, not only
to set up in terms of legal agreements - of who's responsible for what - but also
making sure that you can do what you need to do, when you need to do it,
because if you miss your small window of opportunity, you can be delayed by a year, easily.
In order to achieve three large legal agreements with
Crossrail, Network Rail and Transport for London (TfL) Buses
you have to approach the teams that are working for those three providers in a very
collaborative manner. We were very lucky in that we have a very strong team of
people at British Land and with Sir Robert McAlpine who were able to prove to
those three bodies that we wanted to bring about an outcome that was in
everyone's best interests and was at all times collaborative and achieved with consensus.
That takes a great deal of commitment and above all an exceptional
set of behaviors.
In order to keep everybody informed we put up a big
question to Sir Robert McAlpine. We asked them: "How can you help us to communicate constantly?"
If you think about it you've got over a 150,000
people commuting and coming through the area - now if you're building and you're
constructing around them you're going to disrupt them, there's no two ways about
it. When we first started looking at all of the different stakeholders that we
were need to engage with and communicate with, we really looked at how we would do
that. So you had your kind of traditional methods of emailing, of newsletters,
on-site hoardings, of using hoardings as well, but then we thought actually how
can we do this and communicate with people in a way that they want to be
communicated with? So what we decided is actually the way that people are starting
communicate nowadays is through apps, so we decided to look at what we could do
to produce an app that would give people the information they need, but also
engage them with what we're doing to create a bit of excitement about the
projects that we're working on at Broadgate, starting with 100 Liverpool Street.
I am very pleased to say that in just under two years, I have not had any
serious complaints or any major concerns raised by Chief Executives or any of the
Trustees of any of the businesses that are currently working and occupying Broadgate.
That is a unique success and it was done
by Sir Robert McAlpine working on the basis of over-managing communications.
We do make things happen and that's what we've tried to do with everything from
our base construction build, right through to the way we communicate with
people, how we engage with people and also how we engage with people on site
as well - so it's that kind of, yes what can we think of that's different
and how can we make it happen - and actually doing it as well.
So the Fulcrum is a piece of art. Richard Serra, the American artist whose medium
is corten steel designed this back in the 1980s when Broadgate was first built
and for some inexplicable reason (and we've never really got to the bottom of it)
it was built at the top of a ramp, and that ramp was approximately 1.4 meters above
the concourse of the station and we wanted to have our shopping mall level
from the concourse of the station all the way through 100 Liverpool
Street and on into 1 and 2 Broadgate.
We therefore had to contemplate lowering the Fulcrum.
So we started demolition in various phases in February
this year [2018] and the last phase is a Fulcrum area.
We've had to work from the north all the way around to the station
and in August we redirected the
pedestrians through our building so that we could do the demolition around the Fulcrum.
It's been lowered on the hydraulic jacks.
So there are eight jacks - four on the East Side, four on the West Side
and there's a series 150mm stools.
So the jack stroke is 150mm and our stools are 150mm.
We're going down gradually, surveying it all the way, and then we'll take that
stool out and do another jack stroke.
It is not normal to lower 200-tonne pieces of art 1.4 meters. We required a
planning consent, we required a great deal of structural engineering, but at the end
when we have lowered the Fulcrum, we'll have a long straight level mall and it
will have the same height shopfronts from one end to the other and not as was
previously the case diminishing as you rose up the ramp.
Now that is an enormously difficult structural achievement.
We've had various design departments looking at this,
we've had a Category 3 check done on it...
we cannot afford for this to go wrong.
So at the moment it's on temporary works, so that's all braced
with raking props, various bits are still holding all of the jacks together
and the towers - the temporary towers in place once the structure is lowered,
then we'll do another load transfer onto the new steel work. Then we bolt it all
together, cast the concrete around it, link it all in and then it will
be stable, on its own, so we can take the temporary works out.
It is testament to the abilities, the skill and the determination of all those people that
have worked hard to deliver this that it has been achieved satisfactorily with
the City of London's planner's support, with the artist's support and most of all
with British Land and GIC support.
It's been a magnificent success story and one that I am immensely proud of.
It's not just putting together a building, and structure, and concrete, and
steel work and demolition - it's all the additional stuff that goes with it.
It's given us that starting point to really set the bar really high in terms of what
we are doing and really showcase how good we are and also how exciting
redevelopment and building and construction is.
One of the things that I love about property and development generally is the ability for other
people to walk past and touch and feel the thing that you've created.
I genuinely believe that in early 2020 when the scheme is finished and people
kind of come to it for the first time when it's complete they'll walk past and
they'll touch it and they'll feel it and they'll think "this is a good piece of city" and
it's going to brighten up their day - whether they work here, whether they're just
passing through or whether they're just a visitor.
I think just being able to walk through the Liverpool Street Station and see what we've achieved and
look from the outside at this fantastic building is going to be a great achievement.
My favourite thing about this project, is it's been run well, it's been
run successfully, it's on programme and it's going to be a tremendous success!