7th Mar 2023

One Centenary Way reaches practical completion

Congratulations to the project team as Birmingham’s latest, and one of its largest contemporary commercial buildings, has reached its final construction milestone as part of the Paradise development.

One Centenary Way has reached Practical Completion (PC) this week, as we hand the building over to developer and asset manager MEPC, ready for the occupier fit out phase of internal works.

Despite the challenges of the Covid pandemic and the complexity of the building’s location, directly above the live A38 Queensway tunnel in the heart of Birmingham, it has been constructed with minimal disruption and lost time over the past three years.

The 280,000 sq ft One Centenary Way is one of the city’s most sustainable buildings with a pure electric heating and hot water supply system and SMART access to services, information and facilities throughout its large, 22,000 sq ft floorplates. All of this combines to allow for extremely agile and spacious office layouts as well as highly sustainable new commercial space.

One Centenary Way also bookends Paradise and Centenary Square as a major new landmark for the city. Its sky lantern feature – launched just before Christmas 2022 – underlines this role and provides a major feature within the city centre with a 360-degree light display capable of changing through more than 1 million different colours.

The first major office letting for One Centenary Way was announced in 2021 when global employee-owned built environment consultancy Arup committed to 68,000 sq ft of space across three floors. Arup will be relocating its Midlands office and 1,000 staff to the building later in 2023 and has begun work on their fit out. 

In another significant inward investment move, international investment bank Goldman Sachs cemented its commitment to Birmingham by selecting One Centenary Way at Paradise Birmingham to be the permanent home of its new UK base last year.

Its new office will occupy 110,000 sq ft of space across the top five floors of the building, including a roof terrace overlooking Centenary Square on the 12th floor. This move signified the largest commercial real estate deal in Birmingham of 2022 and a major coup for the city.

Rob Groves, regional development director at MEPC, the commercial property development and asset management arm of Federated Hermes, said: "The practical completion of One Centenary Way is another significant chapter in the story of Paradise and the city. It is a testament to the dedication and collaborative approach of the construction and design teams to deliver this complex new building with its exceptional SMART and sustainability credentials. The early success of the lettings only highlights that its exceptional quality has been recognised and endorsed by leading global businesses."

"As we continue to gather momentum around Paradise and build upon the huge progress we have made so far with Phase One and now the first building completing as part of Phase Two, we can look forward with confidence to further buildings and phases coming ahead.  These include the world first pure Octagon residential tower which is starting to make its mark on the city’s skyline and the start of construction of the next commercial building, Three Chamberlain Square due to start on site later this year."

The basement of the building will feature Birmingham’s first dedicated cycle hub with space for 330 bikes, showers, storage and maintenance facilities opening next year. A large gym and wellness centre is also planned for the lower ground floor, overlooking the new Western Terrace public realm being created as part of the next phase of development.

The building marks the first part of Phase Two of the ground-breaking, 2 million sq ft, £1.2 billion Paradise estate, a new destination at the heart of the city creating thousands of new jobs, new skills, new homes and amenities across up to ten buildings.

This includes the world record breaking Octagon residential tower at 49 storeys, or 155 metres tall, and the development’s multiple award-winning first two commercial buildings, One Chamberlain Square and Two Chamberlain Square, both of which face onto the city’s premier public space.

The first phase of the development also includes a number of high-quality leisure operators, namely Vinoteca and Rosa’s Thai at Two Chamberlain Square, and Dishoom and Albert’s Schloss at One Chamberlain Square.

As an important contributor to regional growth, Paradise is committed to creating high quality new pedestrian streets and squares for everyone to enjoy, as well as improving public transport links across the city. Early work on the access and transport links around Paradise were supported by Greater Birmingham Local Enterprise Partnership (GBSLEP).  

The Paradise redevelopment is being brought forward through Paradise Circus Limited Partnership (PCLP), a private-public joint venture with Birmingham City Council. The private sector funding is being managed by the international business of Federated Hermes, which has partnered with Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments) on the first phase of the development and for One Centenary Way. MEPC is the development and asset manager.

Paradise sits in the country’s largest city centre Enterprise Zone and has already benefited from investment by the GBSLEP in enabling and infrastructure works.

A website showcasing the vision for Paradise, in addition to live time-lapse cameras and all the latest news about the development, can be viewed at www.paradisebirmingham.co.uk

Project spotlight: meet the team at One Centenary Way

My name is Stuart Bale, I'm a Project Director for
Sir Robert McAlpine at One Centenary Way.
One Centenary Way is a twelve story, 282,000 square foot office,
located in central Birmingham, directly over the A38 Queensway.
We're working directly for MEPC,
as part of the overall paradise development
and the key milestones which we've met so far
on this project includes bridging the A38 Queensway
with 16 transfer trusses.
Each of which were made in one piece in Scotland
and brought to site over a period of three days.
The heaviest of which was 120 tonnes.
That key milestone, getting across the tunnel
allowed us to then start the main office building directly off the top of that structure.
We stand here today, a few weeks away from practical completion.
So we've utilised lots of the expertise we have in-house.
We've utilised MDG extensively on the project
from everything within the ground
correcting the structure of the steel frame.
Also, we've used a huge amount of lifting solutions,
with our craning strategies, we've lifted some of the
heaviest pieces of steel here with 10 to 12 tonnes.
As a result we've had some of the heaviest cranes in our fleet
onsite for a long period of time.
One of the real successes of the job is how we balance transfer
that into attention to detail inside and some of the finishes in the toilet areas,
the landlord areas, across the general cat A floors
of which deploy the real focus on quality.
It's certainly something that we've focused on in the last few weeks
as we head towards finishing.
So the building is very unique in that it spans the A38 Queensway
and the way that we developed a solution for that was that we piled either side of the tunnel,
including going through some of the existing structures
to form in essence, a bridge structure to bridge over the live carriageway
which currently has a quarter of a million passengers every day going underneath the live project.

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