Oxford Street, London, WC1

214 Oxford Street is an iconic Grade II listed building on Oxford Circus in the heart of London’s premier shopping district owned by The Crown Estate. The building was arranged over 7 floors above ground and two basements, comprising of 18,000m² of floor area in total.

The building was formally the flagship Topshop store and a key part of the Arcadia Group’s assets but was unfortunately very run down and had been allowed to get into a very sorry state of disrepair.

A key part of this project was tracking and tracing all live services, for which there were no records, diagrams or plans and ensuring that all live retail units, Nike and Vans on the Ground Floor, remained live and operational whilst isolating and removing everything else. This was a very challenging project but with the cooperation of Avison Young (Project Managers) and Siemens (Incumbent Fire Alarm Contractor), we were able to do this safely and ensure that Nike and Vans operations were not disturbed. Once all the services were isolated, we were able to strip and remove the multitude of layers of finishes that had accumulated over decades of new shop fitting over old shopfitting and ultimately removed over 500 40-yard bins of rubbish via the loading bay on Great Castle Street.

Overall, a very challenging but rewarding project with lots of obstacles to navigate and overcome.

  1. No records of existing services, all of which had been installed haphazardly and unsafely over the course of many years of neglect and cost cutting by Sir Philip Green and Arcadia
  2. Nike and Vans stores to be kept live despite having no records or fully compliant system so trial and error out of hours required to understand what services powered the live units and tagging those as live and to remain
  3. Significantly more asbestos that was identified in the original survey which meant sequence and program was impacted.
  4. Significantly more waste encountered than anticipated due to the multiple layers of shopfitting that had occurred over the course of decades.
  5. Very comprehensive and disciplined pedestrian and traffic management system required on Great Castle Street to manage 500+ deliveries and collections of 40-yard skips (1,000 vehicle movements in total) all while working side by side with deliveries coming in daily for Nike and Vans.

Project Details

CLIENT

IKEA

PROJECT TYPE

Strip-out

DURATION

16 Weeks

PROJECT VALUE

£1,700,000

TYPES OF WORK
  • Refurbishment and Demolition Survey
  • Grade II Listed Building
  • Liaison with The Crown Estate
  • Asbestos Removal
  • Service Disconnections
  • Temporary Services
  • Track & Trace of Services to Live Areas
  • Soft Strip
  • Screed Removal
  • Plant Removal
  • On Site Segregation & Recycling
  • 99% Recycling

Project Gallery