Willmott Dixon has topped out the £48.8m School of Business and Management building at Queen Mary University of London’s Mile End campus in Tower Hamlets, the contractor’s second project for the university in under two years.
The seven-storey, 6,700 sq m building, designed by Nicholas Hare Architects, replaces the school’s current accommodation in the Francis Bancroft Building, which around 3,000 students and 100 academic staff have outgrown.
Willmott Dixon is due to complete the building in 2027, ready for it to open to students early that year.
The first four floors house classrooms, breakout areas and study space, with the upper three floors given over to academic and postgraduate activity. The building will also become the permanent home of the Queen Mary Legal Advice Centre, which provides free legal advice to communities across east London, delivered by undergraduate and postgraduate law students working under qualified lawyers.
The site is one of the most constrained Willmott Dixon is currently working on in London, bounded by the canal on one side and sitting above a railway line on the other. Those constraints have shaped crane positioning, delivery sequencing and the phasing of the frame, all while the surrounding campus has remained fully operational throughout construction.
The project is targeting a BREEAM Excellent rating and is being delivered as a LETI (Low Energy Transformation Initiative) Pioneer Project, a designation applied to buildings intended to demonstrate best practice in low energy design.
Landscaped terraces and a green roof will improve the public realm around the building and add biodiversity to a dense inner-London site.
Richard Poulter, managing director for Willmott Dixon in the South: “Topping out is the point where the shape of a building becomes clear, and at Queen Mary that has taken careful planning. The site sits between the canal and a railway line, which has shaped everything from crane positioning to how we sequence deliveries, and the team have worked through those constraints without disrupting the campus around them. This is our second project for Queen Mary in under two years, following the Informatics Teaching Laboratory on the same campus. When this building opens in 2027 it will give the School of Business and Management the space it has outgrown, and give the university’s Legal Advice Centre a permanent home in the community it serves.”
Professor Colin Bailey CBE, President and Principal of Queen Mary: “It is fantastic to see our new Business School building reach this significant milestone in its development. This investment in our infrastructure, along with multiple other projects, are testament to our commitment to providing our students and staff with state-of-the-art facilities in which to learn, educate and carry out world-leading research and exemplifies our vision of opening the doors of opportunity through excellence. I look forward to the building officially opening next year and to seeing our staff, students and the wider community benefit from it.”
The business school follows Willmott Dixon’s retrofit and extension of the Informatics Teaching Laboratory on the same Mile End campus, which opened to students in January this year. Procured via the SCAPE Construction framework, that project retained the original 1989 concrete frame, replaced the façade to improve thermal performance and added two storeys in a hybrid steel and timber structure chosen for its lower embodied carbon. Reusing the existing structure avoided the need for new foundations. Capacity rose from 260 to 450 places, with a green roof, photovoltaic panels and air source heat pumps installed as part of the works.
