Spotlighting Leeds Steel Building Projects
Leeds is strongly connected to steel through the construction and manufacturing sectors. More recently, steel has been central to how the city is reinventing itself. Here are four projects that showcase the city’s transformation.
Wellington Place: A Business Quarter on a Former Railway
Wellington Place, Leeds' biggest office-led development in a generation, is on the site once occupied by Leeds Central Station, which closed in 1967. All that survives of that time is a goods wagon hoist tower and the viaduct crossing the River Aire.
Across the site, several phases of steel-framed office buildings have gone up, including 3 Wellington Place, where steelwork contractor Billington Structures erected 700 tonnes of steel to an irregular grid dictated by the building's wedge-shaped plan, and 6 Wellington Place, where engineers ASD Westok used cellular beams throughout to make the frame lighter and more cost-effective as the scheme came out of recession.
Central Square: Steely Ambition Next to the Station
A short walk away, Central Square is an architectural landmark that was completed in the Leeds business district in 2016. This building was designed with environmental sustainability as one of its main features. Indeed, it was the first office tower in the UK to integrate a unique renewable energy facility that supplies both heat and electricity to its occupants. The development is over 20,000m², and provides almost 19,000m² of Grade A offices in retail, leisure and health and fitness.
The building also features advanced water purification systems that improve energy efficiency and it meets the highest BREEAM standard for environmental protection.
First Direct Bank Arena: A New Civic Landmark
Some reinvention projects can repurpose old infrastructure to give a city something it never had. For example, Leeds Arena, now known as the First Direct Bank Arena, needed spans of up to 70m to create the column-free bowl its 12,500-seat capacity required, which made steel the only realistic choice.
The contractor sequenced 32 major steel sections onto specific trailer loads to keep the roof and stage trusses going up in the right order, working with up to five cranes on site at once. It opened in 2013 with one of the most distinctive arena roofs in Europe.
Blue Steel Building: Reusing a Steel Frame
The most literal example of reinvention that we’re going to showcase here isn't a new building. The Blue Steel building in East Leeds was a 14,500m² steel portal-frame warehouse originally built for Poundstretcher.
Rather than demolish it when a new tenant, Carlsberg UK, took over in 2005, engineers extended the existing steel frame vertically, added parapets, a large loading canopy and a new two-storey office structure within the shell. They also re-clad the whole building, keeping the original steel structure at the heart of a building that now looks nothing like its former self.
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