Westminster Business Council hosted an ESG networking event at 1 Victoria Street, the site of a substantial renovation project that is proving to be a case study in the application of cutting-edge circular economy principles in a prestigious location.
Innovation, collaboration and communication are at the heart of the work under way to renovate and revitalise 1 Victoria Street, which was until recently the HQ of the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
Helena Morris, development director of Stanhope, the property developer at this important location, introduced the science-based approach to the redevelopment of the site, “the elegant backing dancer to the lead singer that is Parliament Square”.
The overall vision was inevitably influenced by the context of the site, its heritage and preservation. It also had to take into account the retrofit-first approach adopted by Westminster City Council.
As Helena said: “We are actually going to be building history. When we build this structure, it will be there for hundreds of years, and it’s really important that we do the right thing.”
Her overview of the project so far was complemented by a panel discussion moderated by Nils Rage, ESG director at Stanhope, and featuring:
- Hazel Joseph, director of AHMM, architects
- Natalie Rowland, partner in planning and development at Newmark UK
- Aisling Reynolds, head of environmental sustainability at Keltbray
- Andrew Middlebrook, associate director of structural engineers Heyne Tillet Steel
- Hrabrina Nikolova, principal sustainability officer at Westminster City Council
Extensive consultation and investigation
From the start, community engagement was central to this project. Discussions began in April 2023 and featured 11 meetings with the council and many more with Historic England, the Twentieth-Century Society, Westminster Abbey and numerous other local stakeholders and residents.
Natalie said: “We knew vacant possession was coming in January 2024, so we knew we had a very tight programme to get to planning for the start of last year – and we filled it with as much consultation as we possibly could.”
In that time there were 11 pre-apps, the cumulative learnings of which resulted in AHMM designing a transformational building befitting its location. The initial scheme would have retained 61% of the existing structure by volume.
At the same time, there was extensive exploration into that existing structure, helped by sourcing a full set of archive drawings. Helena said: “One of the results we found was that the original concrete is particularly salty. It’s so salty that it’s been coined the building that ate itself, because even in the dry environment, that salt is corroding the rebar.”
Efforts to apply an inhibitor to the rebar to arrest the corrosion were unsuccessful, so the scheme had to be reworked. Under the new vision, 52% will be retained. However, one beneficial side-effect is that the temporary works tonnage dropped massively.
As Andrew said, while someone walking down Victoria Street in a year’s time will see a site that has been demolished, the foundations are being reused in their entirety.
He said: “We will maximise reuse, minimise demolition, minimise new materials going in and, therefore, maximise sustainability of that foundation scheme. So it’s a loss to have to do demolition, but we are still working as hard as we can, analytically, with the science and with what’s here.”
Working with Westminster City Council’s retrofit-first policy
The development team has been at pains to work with, and respect, the council’s emerging retrofit-first policy. As Hrabrina explained, that presented challenges to the council too.
She said: “We had learning curves internally because it’s technical for the planning team, but also for the committee members to understand the complexities around retrofits and partial retention of schemes.”
The result is a committee and leadership team that can now apply a high level of rigour. She suggested that this in turn means the industry needs to continue upskilling in retrofit and partial retention.
Other schemes are now coming forward claiming similar issues with corrosion but, as she added: “There has to be a balance out there, and the balance comes with knowledge. We all need to have that science-based approach.”
Clear commitment to circularity
From the start, the development team made it clear it wanted to retain or reuse as much of the existing building and its contents as possible.
The Reusefully partnership carried out a pre-demolition audit, as did the sustainability team at Arup. When Keltbray came on board, it managed the use of Globechain, a materials reuse platform.
Helena described this drive as part of “the good human factor – you have to want to do these things to make it work”. Among the materials that have been or will be reused are:
- Raised floor tiles – about 40,000 of them
- Light fixtures – now in use at an art college in Margate
- Furniture – passed to a youth trust
- Kitchen equipment – donated to the nearby Abbey Centre
- Teak window frames – to be repurposed as furniture in new public spaces
- Security turnstiles – reused by dormakaba
Two circularity initiatives in particular stand out. One is the reuse of the lavender plants that used to stand in the old building. They were presented to a neighbour in the Peabody Estate, who now uses them to make soap and other products under her brand Tropical Farmyard: https://www.instagram.com/tropicalfarmyard/.
Another is the closed-loop glass recycling project. Much of the internal glazing was reusable, and Keltbray negotiated for the delivery of clean skips so that the glass would not be contaminated and could then be recycled. This is believed to be the largest closed-loop glass recycling project to date.
One learning Helena shared was the vital importance of storage in enabling the circular economy. Potential partners often found the cost of storage challenging, and she said: “This is something we need to tackle as an industry, and keep moving forward.”
Aisling added: “The success of what we’ve done here so far is down to the clarity of communication, and the vacant possession. That clarity from the beginning really helped us to work through with Stanhope as to what the intentions were for the project.”
Next steps: Inventive solutions to carbon budgets, and more
“It’s a great start, but it needs to be going all the way through,” is how Helena described the progress so far at this strategically important start. No contractor who works here will be in any doubt about the overall commitment to circularity and sustainability.
Hazel said: “There’s a carbon budget which is allocated to each of the trades. A lot of the people we’re speaking to are really leaning into the challenges set by those targets, and coming up with some inventive solutions of how they can limit their carbon budget usage.
“Recently, we’ve had some exciting relationships start to emerge, for example, with facade contractors who are taking on the challenge and using inventive new solutions to push the industry forward.”
Andrew related how the concrete demolished at the site will be taken away, cleaned and brough back to the site. He said: “It’s downcycling, it can’t be used for the higher end parts of the site, but we can use it in the piles and in the foundation strengthening that we’re doing. So it’s true circular economy through these new processes.”
This clearly has the approval of the council. As Hrabrina said: “Of course, we’d like to see concrete coming back again on every single site. But until circularity is business as usual, our best bet to tackle emissions and climate change is to reuse structures.”
There will continue to be challenges, of course. One question from the floor highlighted the challenge presented by building regulations that require potential reuse materials to be tested.
As Helena agreed: “You can’t warrant a fire door for reuse in a new building 60 years later, it’s just not possible.” She suggested, real conversations around testing and regulations need to take place so that developers can deliver on the targets they need to be meeting.
Our thanks to Stanhope and the expert panel for a hugely enjoyable and insightful event that delivered plenty of useful information for our ESG in Property & Construction Network. A full gallery of event photos can be viewed here: https://flic.kr/s/aHBqjC2f9U
