Blue Sky Building was appointed by British Land to provide pre-construction advice for the initial stage of this development, mainly to assist in negotiations with Network Rail, TFL and Crossrail, who all have major assets alongside or within the building footprint. The site was also heavily constrained by the Broadgate Estate itself with significant access restrictions.
The proposal was to significantly upgrade the building, relocating cores, adding additional floor plates and recladding the whole building. The Northern and Western elevations faced the Broadgate public realm and had no vehicular access opportunities. The whole Eastern elevation was used by TFL as a bus terminus supporting Liverpool Street Station and the Southern elevation was a Crossrail construction site. Some vehicular access was permissible for short-bed vehicles within the service yard beneath the site but the majority of the major construction would require access at street level and a significant amount of piggy-backing of materials via a multi-crane strategy with reduced pick-up points.
The removal of the roof and significant vertical interventions also needed to be tempered by maintaining the highest turnover Boots store in London and the main pedestrian egress from the rail-station in to the Estate, both of which were within the buildings footprint.
