Picture caption: TBC.London is on the south bank of the River Thames, overlooking Tower Bridge: this picture shows the building site.
Incredibly, it was a bike ride among friends that led to a refurbishment project close to Tower Bridge using reclaimed steel beams from a department store.
TBC.London, or Tower Bridge Court, is a £56m refurbishment project which is expected to be finished this summer. Managing partner of Fore Partnership, Basil Demeroutis, was on a bike ride with Gareth Atkinson, a director of Civic Engineers who was working on the West End’s old House of Fraser store refurbishment. Gareth mentioned the steel beams to Basil, and the rest is history.
Using reclaimed steel has been one of the core sustainable elements of the project to bring a 1990s office block into the 21st century.
In some ways, it’s the perfect example of what can be done when you go for a retrofit approach rather than demolishing and rebuilding. The company behind this project, Fore Partnership, is a certified B Corp which specialises in recycling, repurposing, enhancing and repositioning existing buildings. In fact, they have a “retrofit first” strategy.
Their reuse of reclaimed steel in this way is believed to be a UK first. They’ve used 16 tonnes of pre-war steel beams from the old House of Fraser store, plus an additional 40 tonnes of reclaimed steel from sites across the South East. On top of this, all of the reinforcement within the concrete used comes from 98% recycled steel.
The House of Fraser beams date from the 1930s and therefore had to be tested to be sure of the mechanical and chemical properties of the steel. The project also used sustainable building materials, including bricks made from at least 60% waste, and carbon-sequestering plasterboard.
Aside from the sustainable elements of the project, which are impressive, the teams behind this development have created an attractive building with increased floorspace. All this has been achieved in a very tight space both physically and culturally, due to the site being in the Shad Thames conservation area, very close to Tower Bridge.
While retaining some of the building’s structure, including the concrete frame, the building was cut and carved, with three floors added to increase the internal space from 6,300m2 to 10,200m2. The middle of the building was removed and replaced with a new core, and what was a six-storey building is now eight storeys plus a basement. Prior to the project, the basement was a car park.
The building has already topped out and should be finished this summer, so it will be interesting to see what it looks like once it’s completed. The project is a great example of the circular economy in action, but also clearly shows some of the challenges, as they did have to source steel from multiple locations.
Testing and logging the available steel, storing it and ensuring those involved can reserve the amount of steel needed, for when they need it, are just some of the reuse challenges that will hopefully become easier to manage over time.
It’s a real positive that individual companies and projects are committed to this, and we’ll see real growth in the circular economy once this kind of usage is imposed at the planning stage. Once you can only get planning permission based on reusing materials, rather than demolishing and using new building materials, things will change rapidly.
If planning departments in London take this step, other cities will start to follow suit. What do you think about this? Are you already seeing clients making more sustainable choices, or are they put off by costs?
Meanwhile, if you need any assistance with the structural elements of an upcoming project, please do get in touch.
