CIOB Awards 2025: Team – Construction Management

This complex project delivered 12 buildings across six plots in a conservation area, which generated considerable acrimony in planning. Some 500 protestors joined hands around the area in 2015, and Tower Hamlets Council rejected the scheme. It was overruled by the then mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

By incorporating a broad spectrum of stakeholders and using the project charter to build loyalty, commitment and social value, the project execution team turned around the fraught community relationships. It never avoided a difficult conversation, and communicated non-stop via weekly door knocks, newsletters, monthly face-to-face meetings and a project blog.

The team took on more preservation work than initially envisaged, as requested by the mayor, who was responding to consultations with local people and the Spitalfields Trust. This included rows of Victorian warehouses on Blossom Street, and more Victorian buildings, plus one Georgian property, across Shoreditch High Street, Folgate Street and Elder Street. All were in varying degrees of preservation.

The core values of the scheme, as described by British Land project director Lynn Summerfield were “being open and honest, having difficult conversations early and doing what’s right for the project, not what’s easy”. These were embraced by the whole project team including a project charter group comprising the client, contractor and consultants.

This was an ambitious and challenging project, with five different architects, and buildings that were old, new, rebuilt or with retained features. With so many elements to the project, and multiple consultants and contractors, good communication was vital. To address this, the team initiated half-hour updates of ‘big information dumps’ for everyone over Teams. Questions could be asked anonymously, to encourage engagement.

A local concern was that the project could drive out smaller, and local, businesses. However, the variety of spaces created can be used by big or small firms, and there are also spaces for shorter-term lets.

Completed on time, the £232m development in London’s Spitalfields is unique, beautiful and a model of how creating a positive and trusting team culture brings tangible value to a client. Summerfield said that, during the build, “every week I ask to walk around the site with someone different, and everyone has this bounce in their step because I think they know we’re doing something special”.