Engineering Principal Place, London

Principal Place will be a major new mixed-use development on the City and Shoreditch border in EC2, London. The development comprises a mixture of uses, including a contemporary Grade A commercial office building and a landmark residential tower set as well as a 0.5 acre public piazza.

Location

London, United Kingdom

Client

Brookfield Europe

Project Status

Due for completion in 2018

Architect

Foster and Partners

The office building comprises over 600,000 square feet of Grade A office accommodation across 15 storeys, with 20,000 square feet of retail at ground level.

The development provides large flexible floor plates, which range from 30-45,000 square feet with two atria and landscaped roof terraces on Level 10 and Level 16. A BREEAM Rating of Excellent is being targeted.

Entrances to both the office building and the residential tower face a half acre landscaped piazza, with a retail pavilion, which occupies the corner of the site along Worship Street and Norton Folgate. This public plaza occupies the air-rights space over a railway cutting in the south east corner of the site. The structure of the plaza was completed in 2009 and the final landscaping of this will be completed as part of this new development.

Further engineering challenges were presented by the adjacent Network Rail asset and WSP are leading the Network Rail approval process for the whole development site.

We have provided a full multidisciplinary service to the client including: structural engineering, geotechnical and fire engineering, vertical transportation, land remediation, transport planning and acoustics services.

The development is on the site of the first gasworks in London and Museum of London Archaeology has completed a survey of the site recording any industrial archaeological remains from that period.