The finished building on the canal, and a real photograph of it. Everything that makes a canalside address desirable is also what makes it difficult to build on.
The full story
Elevate Property Group bought the site on Cliveland Street with the permission already in place. A six-storey building of 52 apartments on a tight canalside plot in Birmingham's Gun Quarter had been granted permission in March 2019, with 26 conditions, to a scheme designed by another practice. What a permission does not come with is a building. It comes with conditions, a set of planning drawings that were never meant to be built from, and a programme that starts the moment the site changes hands. We were appointed to close that gap.
The plot is the hard part. It runs between the street and the towpath of the Birmingham and Fazeley Canal, and on its remaining sides it meets buildings that were occupied and working throughout. There was no room for a compound, neighbours within touching distance of the frame, and a crane that had to swing somewhere.
Before a brick was laid there was a demolition to coordinate around live neighbouring uses, a condition survey to agree, and access to negotiate with adjoining owners so the site could be surveyed at all. Rights of light, oversailing and crane positions were settled by agreement rather than left to become disputes on site. Then the programme bit: the contractor started in August 2019, and structural setting-out and lift-shaft information had to be with the engineer in time to be checked and issued before groundworks.
The detailed design was produced as a full working-drawing set: general arrangements, sections, window and door schedules, and the junction details a light-gauge steel frame demands. The building went up on a light-gauge steel system, which front-loads everything, because the frame is manufactured off site and the information has to be right before it is made rather than corrected after.
Building regulations ran in parallel with an approved inspector rather than local authority control, and the fire strategy was worked through with them in detail. That meant sixty-minute resistance at the window reveals, and a considered treatment of the narrow void between the new building and the structures it stands against.
Conditions were the long game. At least ten were prepared, submitted and tracked with the client's planning consultant, including the sample materials and the one square metre brickwork panel that had to be approved before the envelope could proceed. Alongside them ran a set of non-material amendments and a variation, and the last of the conditions were still being lodged into January 2021.
Behind the site stands a locally listed reinforced-concrete shot tower, and Elevate asked whether it could be brought back into use. We designed a conversion to a single dwelling and submitted it as a separate application in August 2019. The geometry did not work: the separation and overlooking between the tower and the consented block could not be resolved without acquiring the building next door. Single-storey options, set-back terraces and a communal terrace were all tested before we advised the client the scheme would not carry, and the application was withdrawn that December. The tower itself was retained, with structural remedial works and screening delivered as part of the main build. Testing an opportunity properly, and saying plainly when it does not stack up, is cheaper than pursuing it.
Through construction we acted as contract administrator, issuing a monthly architect's report from July 2019 to December 2020, fourteen in all. The build ran straight through the pandemic: from March 2020 progress meetings moved off their normal footing, supplier contacts were furloughed mid-detail, and technical queries had to be re-routed to whoever was still at a desk. The reporting did not stop. Fifty-two apartments were completed and handed over, and the consent Elevate bought in March 2019 was a building by January 2021.
