Three chasing £120m King’s Cross life sciences job
By Tom Lowe6 July 2022
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Work set to start on Merck building early next year
Three firms are chasing a £120m-plus deal to build an office and life sciences centre opposite King’s Cross station in London which will be the UK headquarters of global healthcare giant MSD.
Developer Precis Group’s 10-storey building, which has been designed by architect AHMM, will be built on an Access self-storage warehouse on the Euston Road.
Tenders were sent out to Mace, ISG and Bam last week with the value of the job put at north of £120m.
Merck Kings Cross
The 10-storey building will be built over the road from King’s Cross station
Bids are due back in the autumn with a winner set for late October ahead of work starting on site in the first quarter of next year.
Precis said laboratories make up around 40% of the building’s total floorspace with associated office, research and ‘write-up’ space at levels four to nine.
Previously, Precis has said the “proposals meet the needs of MSD for their London Discovery Centre and UK headquarters to accommodate approximately 850 employees, of which around 150 would be laboratory-based research scientists”. It will also include permanent exhibition space.
MSD, which is known as Merck outside Europe, is the only tenant of the building.
General Demolition has been appointed to knock down the current low-rise art deco building called Belgrove House.
Others working on the scheme include QS Alinea, project manager CPC, structural engineer AKT II and services engineer Atelier Ten.
The site is within London’s ‘Knowledge Quarter’ and close to the Francis Crick biomedical research institute built by Laing O’Rourke and designed by PLP and HOK.
The Knowledge Quarter, the area around King’s Cross, the Euston Road and Bloomsbury, also includes the Wellcome Trust and the British Library which is being redeveloped to include life sciences.