Project Description
Plot H1 is the final plot in Lendlease’s Elephant Park masterplan, prominently situated next to the train station and the new Elephant & Castle Town Centre development.
This plot offers over 500,000 square feet of premium office space across 18 storeys, with a range of large floor plates, to accommodate small, medium, and large enterprises.
This development is set to bring significant employment opportunities to an area undergoing extensive regeneration.
Project Challenges
From the outset, the goal was to use visual mass timber to offer reduced embodied carbon compared to typical concrete and steel frame solutions and to provide a desirable ‘timberness’ quality to the building's interior spaces. Additionally, achieving column grids of 9.0m was essential to ensure high flexibility of fit-out and to compete effectively with concrete or steel office products in the market.
In response, we developed a hybrid frame using CLT planks and steel cellular beams. This approach enabled a shorter storey height than a full mass-timber frame and offered greater flexibility around MEP services in the ceiling compared to glulam. Steel columns maximise the floor area, in contrast to concrete or timber columns, and the reinforced concrete core provides a highly fire-resistant solution for escape and lifting. This true hybrid design exploits the best attributes of each material while meeting the aspirational brief to deliver uniquely attractive office spaces.
The project is significantly larger than any UK office project involving mass timber to date. Consequently, extensive engagement with the mass timber supply chain was required from the very start to ensure availability, reliability of supply volume, and optimisation of mass timber elements to minimise wastage.
Such a significant office building constructed with unconventional materials necessitates a bespoke approach to Building Regulations. From a very early stage, we collaborated with expert fire consultants OFR to develop a robust and efficient solution for using combustible structural materials. The fire condition governs the CLT plank size and specification.
