Major Project : Edinburgh St James Quarter

We were very excited to see the Edinburgh St James Quarter galleria open for the first time to visitors on 24th June and the front cover photo on this newsletter was taken on opening day. Originally due to open in 2020, work was forced to temporarily come to a halt on the £1 billion development amid the coronavirus lockdown, and construction has been underway for five years to bring the new site to life, after the former St James Centre closed its doors for the last time in 2016.

Edinburgh St James Quarter introduces a new retail led, lifestyle district that fully integrates into and enhances Edinburgh’s City Centre providing an inspiring, attractive, and vibrant destination for locals and visitors to live, shop, eat, sleep and play. St James Quarter accommodates an enviable line up of restaurants, cafés, bars, shops, public spaces, leisure venues, residential and hotel accommodation.

The development, which spans across 1.7 million square feet, accommodates 85 shops and more than 30 food outlets, as well as Scotland’s first W Hotel, which includes a bar, outdoor terrace, restaurant, and spa. Still to come in the later phases of the development, over the next 18 months, will be more shops, restaurants and bars, a boutique Everyman Cinema, a Roomzzz Aparthotel, and 152 New Eidyn residential apartments.

Everyone at Wallace Whittle is very proud of the part we played in bringing this fantastic development to fruition, providing MEP engineering design and Sustainability consultancy with an MEP construction value of £70m. We were engaged from concept to completion, and this has been a journey of more than 10 years to date. We have worked with many talented and dedicated people and companies along the way, and we are very much looking forward to seeing Edinburgh St James Quarter fully complete.