Canary Wharf Group and Kadans Science Partner have submitted a detailed planning application for what is likely to be the tallest life sciences wet lab building in the world.
The joint venture’s application reveals that up to 60% of the 23-storey, 823,000 sq ft tower could be laboratories, with the ability to provide chemistry and high containment facilities. The rest will be more conventional workspace.
The tower will be the anchor development on CWG’s 3.5 ha North Quay site at Canary Wharf, which the JV plans to transform into a 3.5 million sq ft life sciences hub for east London.
PropertyEU revealed that CWG is in talks with other parties to create an East London hub and that it leased 40,000 sq ft to Kadans in an existing tower elsewhere on the London Docklands estate, 20 Water Street, in our feature ‘Following the Science’ published last month. Click here to read the feature.
The idea is to fit out the Water Street space as labs by 2023 to begin to create an ecosystem well before the new tower is completed and being occupied in 2026.
Kadans said the 23-storey tower’s design, by Kohn Pedersen Fox, uses an innovative stacking programme allowing for a distributed mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineering strategy across the stacks. This enables the building to provide lab space on every floor and flexibility in tenant scale, arrangement and expansion.
It also incorporates dedicated clinical and chemical waste facilities, multiple goods-lifts with oxygen monitors, freezer farms and specialised receiving and storage areas for hazardous, clinical and chemical goods. The building’s central service provision will include Nitrogen (gaseous & liquid), CO2 and compressed air.
An all-electric heating and cooling strategy will minimize greenhouse gas emissions, Kadans said, and the building is targeting BREEAM rating Excellent, with an aspiration for Outstanding for the laboratory and office areas.
The development’s biggest challenge may be that - unlike rival locations in central London - it has no teaching hospital or research institute on site and it must create a science community from scratch, something acknowledged by CWG’s managing director, Richard Archer.
He told PropertyEU that CWG is negotiating agreements with other parties to help create an East London Life Science District, similar to the Knowledge Quarter around Kings Cross or SC1, the area around London Bridge.
Michel Leemhuis, CEO of Kadans Science Partner, claimed the North Quay tower ‘marks a step change in the way ecosystems for knowledge-intensive businesses are designed and developed.’
