At 308 metres, The Shard is Western Europe’s tallest building and a landmark achievement within the wider regeneration project we oversaw at London Bridge.
KEY INFORMATION
Location: London, UK
Date started: 2016
Completion date: 2016
Client type: real estate
Main capabilities: project management
About the development
Set just a few steps south of London Bridge station, The Shard is an 87-storey building containing the 200-bed Shangri-La Hotel, world-class restaurants, viewing galleries, offices and retail zones.
Its tapering glass structure has transformed London’s skyline, while being skilfully placed amongst the buildings of nearby Guy’s Hospital and the English Heritage listed rail station, as well as sitting over London Bridge Underground lines.
A spectacular building, The Shard is part of a wider regeneration project for London Bridge. The development includes the new London Bridge Place office building, a redeveloped station concourse and new bus station around a central plaza.
Communication and control
We began work on The Shard and London Bridge Quarter when they were ambitious projects still just on paper. We worked with the developers to establish a commercial strategy, which realised significant savings from the contractors’ proposals and satisfied the funder’s commercial criteria.
We also revised the bidding process for key work packages to mitigate a number of identified risks.
Once the project was underway, we implemented our phased approach to delivery, maintained viability of the development in a changing market, and managed a multi-disciplinary project team.
We led the strategy for London Bridge Place and maintained close oversight of potential impacts of works on the surrounding area. This involved the installation of 900 monitoring points across third party assets and a dashboard to keep external stakeholders informed.
Challenging firsts
Within our programme and project management remit we had to coordinate and enable a series of firsts for the UK construction industry:
- A pioneering ‘topdown’ construction strategy enabling both substructure and superstructure to get underway simultaneously
- ‘Jump-lifting’ of the central core –a self-climbing elevator system providing an alternative to exterior hoists
- London’s largest continuous concrete pour (5,500m3 delivered and poured over 36 hours)
- The UK’s tallest crane at 255m high
Our achievement
The Shard was a major development in a constrained physical environment and in that context we anticipated and responded to many challenges, engaging with stakeholders, maintaining the viability of the scheme, offering innovative solutions, and managing over 700 legal obligations on our client’s behalf. We were the central coordinating team, vital to realising a radical new addition to the London skyline.
