Natsumi Honjigawa

With the strengthening of our offer across England, we asked our England Director, Craig Robertson, to give us his thoughts on our recent regional growth and sector diversity…

Wallace Whittle operates nationwide from our locations in London and Warrington and currently have projects in Yorkshire and Manchester in the North, London and Plymouth in the South as well as Norwich in the East and Cardiff in Wales.

We’ve worked with great people on excellent projects, often providing engineering input to incorporate advanced and leading edge technologies and Modern Methods of Construction. A considerable focus has been put on achieving optimum sustainable solutions. The range of projects has been extensive, including those for blue chip clients and often working with world class architects, engineers and specialists.

Many of these developments are mixed-use and so there has always been a wide variety of challenges to meet. I have led many town centre and retail developments for Wallace Whittle, and it is rewarding to be able to work on solutions which provide a built environment for future generations, which will increasingly be integrated with Work, Rest & Play Developments.

While residential accommodation remains a core component within these projects, flexibility is also key with commercial and community facilities often included. We currently have projects which cover many sectors including residential mixed-use, incorporating affordable and market-value homes as well as private rental (PRS/BTR) apartments and serviced apartments, aparthotels, Purpose Built Student Accommodation (PBSA) in Bristol and Leeds, and CoLiving, which also provide leisure and workplace accommodation for occupiers.

I’ve seen a growth in the incorporation of leisure facilities in mixed-use urban regeneration and increasing focus on Wellbeing and community. Traditional elements such as cinemas and hotels are still very much evident but recently complemented by innovative fun options such as electronic crazy golf, high quality artisan street food, and interactive activities from darts to rock climbing.

Some of our recent leisure experience includes new Hotels for Hilton in Woking and Brighton, for Dalata in Brighton, and for Reef Group in Oxford.

Offices and contemporary workplace is a busy and growing sector, and some of our current projects include a new HQ for Royal London in the City of London at Fenchurch Street where they will relocate into the top floors of the building with 600 staff, and fit out of new offices for PayPal.

I was pleased to see completion of HB Reavis’ Bloom Clerkenwell office. We were involved in this project at the outset providing commercial expertise for their acquisition, and delivering a sustainable energy solution for the building.

We are also working with BT as part of their Better Workplace Programme an exciting strategic approach to deliver new state of the art workplace across the UK for one of the nations leading companies, having been involved with their new 6,000m² contact centre in Warrington and redeveloped workplace in Glasgow, and we have recently started on a similar refurbishment project in Cardiff of a similar size for BT.

We are also very pleased to be helping Nuffield with their new world class 10,000m² 54 bed, 5 theatre treatment centre in Bournemouth. Further project diversity is provided by our commission with Smurfit Kappa, the major packaging manufacturer, where we are integrating services solutions within their processing to optimise sustainable technologies at their plants in the North Wales.

A year on from his debut at Wallace Whittle, we asked our Sustainability Director, David Spiteri, to gives us his thoughts as we look back through the last twelve months.

Well, where has the time gone? In April 2021, as part of our post MBO renaissance we committed to significantly enhance our Sustainable consultancy capability and put sustainable design firmly at the core of everything we do. One year on, this month also marks my first anniversary at the helm of the Wallace Whittle Sustainability department.

From day one, my vision was clear; to develop the business into the sector leader for sustainable environmental building services engineering design, promoting human-centric environments whilst minimising the impact on our planet. Why? We are passionate about sustainability and understand the urgency to create a built environment which can stand the test of time. We also recognise the considerable influence our industry and our activities have on our ecosystems, with UK real estate accounting for:

Government, local authorities, funders and developers have concluded that sustainability in building developments is a broad-ranging and complex subject which must be considered and scrutinized from the inception of any project to truly stand the chance of making an impact.

A year on from the launch of our Edinburgh office, we asked Edinburgh Director, Stephen Osborne, to summarise some highlights from the last twelve months.

It has been a fast and exciting year and I have very much enjoyed the growth of our Edinburgh office, building on my own 30 years to date as an MEP Consultant in the city, as well as the wide portfolio of work completed previously by Wallace Whittle. There can’t be many new offices that can point to a development like Edinburgh St James Quarter and say, “we did that…”. I’ve had great support from clients, industry friends and colleagues, and the trust put in me and my team is hugely appreciated.

Our projects are diverse, spread across various sectors, reflecting the experience and flexibility of the team. In offices, we are delivering new workspace for Rathbones Wealth Management, for Burges Salmon solicitors, and at Rowan House where we are refurbishing four floors of quality Grade A office space. We are very happy to work beyond the confines of the city, and we are providing MEP design and Sustainability and Wellbeing consultancy for the new Royal London HQ, at 80 Fenchurch Street in London, as well as an industrial project for James Donaldson Timber at Ilkeston. In education, we are working on a comprehensive refurbishment of the Stow Building for Glasgow School of Art, and both Maybole Community Campus and Ardrossan Community Campus are being delivered from Edinburgh. Both campuses are sector exemplars in sustainable low carbon fossil-fuel free design, with Maybole achieving band A LEIP funding. Our residential commissions include Columba House, recently submitted for Planning, and the Dundashill residential development, comprising 79 new build exemplary low carbon homes.

We have provided professional services support in Technical Due Diligence, condition, and acquisition surveys, and undertaken a series of refurbishment works, including low carbon plant replacement at the Thistles Centre in Stirling.

Several other projects are currently at early stages and can’t be disclosed here, including new premises for a luxury retail operator and an innovative leisure project. We have even discussed conversion of a highland castle to five star leisure accommodation.

Our Edinburgh team has grown in line with the projects we have secured, and we now have twelve staff based in the Edinburgh office. This includes Sustainability and Wellbeing, as well as MEP engineering expertise, and our company marketing is led from Edinburgh, providing a strong, talented, and diverse team of people. We are closely integrated with the wider business and enjoy the support of resource and specialisms from our other offices as required. We are currently recruiting for Graduates and Degree Apprentices and we will continue to grow the team to ensure that we consistently deliver quality of product and service.

Our office at Spaces at Lochrin Square has been flexible and served us well as we have built our team, but we have now outgrown it and we look forward to moving into our new city centre office in early summer. We are fitting the office out to reflect our move to hybrid agile working and this, along with our additional staff benefits, underlines our increased focus and commitment to staff wellbeing.

Looking to the future, we are working on several exciting new projects which are all confidential at this stage. I look forward to sharing more news as these become public, and to continuing to build the Edinburgh office to serve the needs of our clients and collaborators. Please get in touch if you would like to hear more about what we are up to, and I would be delighted to meet to discuss any assistance we can offer you.

We are delighted to announce the internal appointment of Raymond Kelly as our Quality & Standardisation Manager, with responsibility for driving consistent and exemplary quality on all our projects, across all sectors. This is a new role within the business, and as a respected long term and highly valued member of the Wallace Whittle family with more than 42 years industry experience, Raymond has the full backing of the Management Board, and is ideally placed to drive our quality to even greater levels.

‘I am looking forward to this new role which serves to underline the Management Board’s commitment to improving already high levels of design standards and ensuring we maintain high quality of the product across the Business. We’ve got fantastic people in this company, and I’ve been very lucky to have worked alongside many of them and witness for myself how committed people are, and how willing Wallace Whittle are, to making things better, even when the pressure is on and in the face of the daily challenges we meet! I hope by providing a focus on quality and standardisation, that not only can we reinforce the Wallace Whittle brand, but we can also benefit individually and each get more personal satisfaction at the end of day’s work.’

We thank Raymond for taking on this key responsibility, and we offer him our support in this key area of our business.

Given the success recently with the likes of Amazon Prime and Netflix going behind the scenes for all access content TV programmes, We are excited to reveal that we will be starring in our own fly on the wall documentary called ‘We’re Going To Need A Bigger Plant Room’. The 2 part mini series will take you through the daily struggles of MEP engineers and their constant battle to convince the rest of the design team that we need more space. This hard hitting, emotional edge of your seat series will provide a never before seen account of the challenges facing the unsung heroes of construction. Episode one ‘Sky Hooks’ focuses on how engineer Rick Shaw deals with the difficult task of incorporating invisible supports for the MEP services. Episode two ‘Dark Arts’ follows Associate Mona Lott as she tries in vain to explain how exactly MEP services work.

One year to the day since we relaunched Wallace Whittle, we are delighted with how the past twelve months have gone for the company in a whirlwind of activity, and development.

The last year has been all consuming for me to say the least, and I simply would not have it any other way. I would like to make special mention of our fantastic staff and my fellow Directors, who have faced the challenge head on, sharing my drive and ambition to make Wallace Whittle market leading in every single area we possibly can while maintaining our key focus on quality of product and quality of service at all times.

Highlights of the year have seen the business firmly establishing itself once again across key sectors and regions, and also growing in terms of order book and in staff numbers and office locations.

Our celebrations include enhanced regional growth across England, while maintaining organic growth in Scotland, Ireland and the Middle East. We are also celebrating the growth of our market leading Sustainability team, headed by David Spiteri, as we and our clients face the global climate emergency.

In-house the development of our very own WW:BeneFIT portal, WW:Direct online shop and WW:Intranet have also been very important, as these platforms allow us to engage much more closely with our staff while also enhancing their overall package and providing additional benefits for them and their families.

Looking to the year ahead, we are again sitting with a very healthy order-book across all offices and we expect continued managed growth in certain key locations.

A particular focus for me is the internal appointments of Raymond Kelly to become our Quality and Standardisation Manager and Paul Hargreaves to become our Academy Manager. These internal appointments will allow us to put much greater emphasis to both of these massively important areas.

The WW:Academy in particular is a key company objective as this will allow us to attract and develop new staff, as well as providing a targeted focus on existing aspiring staff and the next generation, to let us develop and “grow our own” via various programmes over the coming months and years.

As always I’m only too happy to chat further about any areas covered in this newsletter or our business, so please get in touch.