North hanover street

Watkin Jones Group

The challenge

An “Island” site bound with adopted highways all round, the North Hanover Street site is at a busy interchange in Glasgow. Not immediately obvious as a development site, the client’s brief was to create a Purpose Built Student Residence with as many rooms as possible!

Our solution

With a design concept that saw the site plan absolutely filled, our solution had to carefully consider the boundary interfaces with the highways. The site sloped and added to a need to maximise accommodation at and above ground level, the proposals involved an embedded retention solution (contiguous piles) around the full perimeter. A reinforced concrete flat slab structure was utilised with 2.85 m floor-to-floor heights allowing fourteen storeys at its maximum. Cladding is mostly facing brick interspersed with precast concrete cladding which we also designed and detailed on behalf of the supplier, Plean Precast.