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UCL’s New East London Campus Reaches Full Height
1 June 2021
The key milestone for the UCL East project was officially celebrated with a topping out ceremony, marking a significant point of the future of cutting-edge education in the East Bank quarter.
A small delegation of senior figures from UCL including the UCL President and Provost, lead contractors VINCI and Mace, and other important stakeholders, ascended to the roof top of both Pool Street West and Marshgate, to take in the view from the highest points of the new campus during the socially distanced ceremony.
Built to be a part of the surrounding Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park and the fledgling East Bank project, the campus has been designed to be a location for teaching, research, and student living, as well as retail. Encouraging engagement between not only UCL students and staff but also the general public, both Pool Street West and Marshgate have been designed with entrances and open approaches on all sides, allowing seamless transitions for all visitors to the park from the outside into the building.
Dr Michael Spence, UCL's President and Provost spoke of his vision for the future campus saying, "UCL East will be transformative for everyone who lives, learns, teaches and innovates here. These stunning structures will be home to world-leading research, world-beating student experiences, jobs and opportunities. I believe its graduates will be the next generation of thinkers, makers and doers leading the world.”
Kevin Argent, Executive Director of Estates Development, UCL, said “Today marks a key moment for both projects across this development, which is part of our pivotal Transforming UCL programme. Working together with our contracting partners, Mace on Marshgate and Vinci on Pool Street West, we have continued to adjust and adapt to maintain programme. This is despite the numerous challenges we have encountered over the past year. Once completed the benefits that this campus will bring to UCL staff, students, and the general public, will be seen for many years to come.”
UCL East will be home to interdisciplinary research, with faculties from engineering, science, humanities, arts, and finance working together. Bringing together a variety of subject areas across the campus, students will be better equipped to help provide answers to society’s challenges in the era of artificial intelligence, climate change and robotics. The layout of the buildings have been designed to facilitate these learning opportunities and collaborations by providing an open learning culture, encouraging and driving creativity to new levels.
Philip Willmott, Regional Director at VINCI Construction UK, who are building Pool Street West, said: “Creating academic space as well as high-quality sustainable student accommodation within the two towers, which will house state-of-the-art facilities and form the foundations for the new campus, makes us incredibly proud of our achievements in reaching this milestone, and we look forward to handing over the completed building in Spring 2022.”
Terry Spraggett, Managing Director Public Sector Construction at Mace, who are building Marshgate, said “Having achieved net zero carbon status as a business at the end of 2020, we’re proud to continue to build on our achievement and support UCL’s net zero carbon commitment. Together with the university and our supply chain partners we set out a bold carbon reduction plan that will see embodied carbon minimised when the building is completed. The quality of the work is testament to the collaborative team effort, and we are looking forward to when Marshgate will open in 2023.”
Although the structure of the buildings itself supports the vision of an environmentally sustainable centre of learning and a top-quality residence, from the start of the project, the contractors factored in the impact of construction on the local environment. Old equipment was repurposed to construct bird shelters and bat boxes, and a 1-metre margin was left around the perimeter of the site which was sown with wildflowers to provide food for pollinators. The additional features of the building that will make it a low-consumption, high-efficiency building will become more apparent as construction continues into the next phase of the project.
UCL East will be the first HEI to open within the new East Bank project, with Pool Street West due to complete in spring 2022, opening in the autumn of 2022, and Marshgate due to complete in winter 2022 and open in the autumn of 2023. The two buildings will mark the first lines in a new chapter of UCL’s 195-year story, providing a home to disruptive and innovative thinkers within the new creative and learning hub in east London.