Tiger Developments has started construction on a new purpose-built student accommodation scheme in Manchester. The development is located on Carmoor Road, within walking distance of the University of Manchester, and will provide 172 student bedrooms upon completion. Once finished, the building will be operated by Host, the student accommodation management
Plans have been submitted for phase one of East Bank Urban Village – one of Hull’s largest ever regeneration projects – which is set to breathe life back into the East Bank of the River Hull through the creation of a sustainable new neighbourhood. Hull City Council, working in collaboration
Vanguard Self Storage, one of the UK’s leading independent self-storage companies, has confirmed significant progress on its new Maidenhead branch, scheduled for handover in August and opening in September 2026 – exactly one year after the project was first announced. This development marks Vanguard’s tenth location in England, expanding its
McLaughlin & Harvey has completed the construction of a major new academic facility at the University of Edinburgh, marking another milestone in the ongoing transformation of the institution’s King’s Buildings Campus. The new Engineering Forum building, which will house the School of Engineering’s Institute for Energy Systems, provides 6,500 sq
Between December 2025 and February 2026, UK GDP grew by 0.5%; however, unlike services and production, which grew by 0.5% and 1.2% respectively, construction fell by 2.0%. Richard Beresford, Chief Executive of the National Federation of Builders (NFB), said: “The economy is in a stronger place than many presumed; however, growth
Work has started in Hamilton to deliver 142 new homes, representing a £42 million investment from top 10 housebuilder Keepmoat. Set to transform the former Bell College site, Keepmoat will deliver a mixed tenure scheme, including 36 affordable homes in partnership with South Lanarkshire Council. The much needed development will
Nearly half of Spacemaker’s installations run in freezer and cold storage environments, serving food, beverage, and pharmaceutical operators across the United States. Having completed nearly 50 cold storage facilities, you stop theorizing about what works and start knowing. Spacemaker has been deploying pallet shuttle systems in sub-zero, freezer-grade, and cold
Tiger Developments has started construction on a new purpose-built student accommodation scheme in Manchester. The development is located on Carmoor Road, within walking distance of the University of Manchester, and will provide 172 student bedrooms upon completion. Once finished, the building will be operated by Host, the student accommodation management arm of Tiger Developments and one of the UK’s largest providers in the sector. The project has a gross development value of £40 million and is being funded by Tiger Developments alongside its financing partner Hampshire Trust Bank. Construction is being delivered by GMI Construction Group, with completion scheduled for the 2027/28 academic year. Around 15% of the rooms will be offered at discounted market rent to support students from lower-income backgrounds. The development is targeting BREEAM Excellent and EPC A ratings, reflecting a focus on sustainability and energy efficiency in its design and operation. The Carmoor Road scheme is positioned to meet rising demand for professionally managed student accommodation in Manchester, one of the UK’s largest university cities. It also forms part of Tiger Developments’ wider expansion strategy across major university locations, including two additional schemes currently underway in Bristol. John Nesbitt, Executive Director at Tiger Developments, said: “We are delighted to begin construction on our latest scheme in Manchester, a city that has strong demand for well-located student accommodation. This development reflects our commitment to delivering sustainable, thoughtfully designed homes for students, while also contributing positively to the local community. Through our trusted student housing brand Host, we look forward to welcoming students in time for the 2027/28 academic year.” Building, Design & Construction Magazine | The Choice of Industry Professionals
Plans have been submitted for phase one of East Bank Urban Village – one of Hull’s largest ever regeneration projects – which is set to breathe life back into the East Bank of the River Hull through the creation of a sustainable new neighbourhood. Hull City Council, working in collaboration with lead development partner ECF (the partnership between Homes England, L&G and Muse), has submitted detailed designs for phase one of East Bank. The hybrid application also includes outline plans for the wider neighbourhood which, once complete, will deliver around 850 new homes on the site opposite the Old Town. Once an important part of Hull’s maritime industry, use of this area has seen a significant decline since the mid-20th century. Today, the site is primarily occupied by surface parking and vacant brownfield land. Over the next 15 years, East Bank Urban Village will introduce a mix of affordable houses and Build-To-Rent (BTR) apartments alongside shops, restaurants, leisure and other neighbourhood uses. An interconnected network of streets, plazas, green spaces and a new riverside promenade will improve connectivity, creating active travel routes that encourage walking and cycling throughout the site. Phase one will establish the core of the new neighbourhood, delivering 37 townhouses and 78 apartments across two buildings. All of the homes will be affordable, helping to meet local demand and ensuring East Bank is inclusive and accessible to a wide range of people. Phase one will also include the landing for the Scale Lane bridge on the eastern bank of the River Hull and the connection to the existing Trinity Buoy Shed – a much-loved local heritage building – which will be brought back into use as part of the long-term vision for the neighbourhood. Later phases will deliver more than 700 Build-To-Rent (BTR) and affordable apartments across the wider neighbourhood, improving connections to nearby areas including the Fruit Market. In addition to the new homes, there are plans to revitalise the area around the Drypool Basin, as a contemporary community space. In September and October 2025, the council and ECF led a series of community conversations, where local people had the opportunity to offer constructive suggestions which fed directly into the masterplan. This included the need for more green community spaces, parking and traffic management, enhancing biodiversity and finding new uses for existing historical landmarks including the former Lock Keeper’s Cottage. Raife Gale, senior development manager at ECF said: “Local people have been supportive – and so insightful – in offering their feedback, and this has all fed into the final planning application we’ve submitted. “Our plan is to deliver a sustainable new neighbourhood where people want to live, work and spend time – and key to this is creating quality homes, attractive public spaces and new leisure and business opportunities. East Bank will kick-start a new chapter for this part of the city’s riverside, ensuring it continues to play a role for future generations. “The council has an ambitious programme of regeneration which is already helping transform the city centre, as seen with the recently completed redevelopment of the Museums Quarter and Old Town, and we are using our knowledge and expertise in delivering complex schemes across the UK to help unlock the next phase of the city’s development.” The project is supported by £9.8m in government-backed Levelling Up Partnership funding, underpinning enabling works and early infrastructure delivery. East Bank Urban Village will also make a significant contribution to the council’s ambition to deliver 2,500 new homes within Hull city centre as part of its Local Plan. It will also act as a catalyst site for Hull’s recently endorsed City Centre Vision. By using state-of-the-art materials and technologies, including sustainable drainage systems, throughout the neighbourhood, East Bank Urban Village will also follow the principles of Hull’s “Living With Water” project. Chris Jackson, director of regeneration and partnerships at Hull City Council, said: “It is pleasing that the council has been able to submit plans for phase one of East Bank Urban Village. “This is a significant regeneration project which will help to meet the council’s housing targets, revitalise a long-term brownfield site and also support both Hull’s Old Town and city centre economies. “We have already welcomed extensive public feedback on draft proposals for East Bank ahead of this planning submission and look forward to hearing their thoughts on the updated plans.” East Bank Urban Village has been selected as a national case study by the UK Real Estate Investment and Infrastructure Forum (UKREiiF) which is held annually in Leeds in May. The video case study, which is now live, captures how Hull City Council and ECF are working in partnership to accelerate delivery, attract investment and showcase Hull’s broader regeneration strategy to the national market. The project’s inclusion is expected to further boost investor confidence as East Bank moves toward delivery, if planning approval is achieved. For more information go to www.eastbank-hull.com Building, Design & Construction Magazine | The Choice of Industry Professionals
Vanguard Self Storage, one of the UK’s leading independent self-storage companies, has confirmed significant progress on its new Maidenhead branch, scheduled for handover in August and opening in September 2026 – exactly one year after the project was first announced. This development marks Vanguard’s tenth location in England, expanding its growing portfolio of high-quality storage facilities across the country. Since the announcement in September 2025, key works completed at the site have included the following: The project remains on track for an August handover, with final works underway to ensure the branch meets Vanguard’s high standards. Once open, the branch will feature: The Maidenhead branch is expected to generate four new jobs, while supporting broader employment in associated local and surrounding businesses, reinforcing Vanguard’s commitment to the neighbouring community and economy. Will McCullagh, Managing Director of Vanguard Self Storage, said, “This facility represents a major investment in the local community, providing high-quality, secure storage solutions and creating new employment opportunities. We look forward to opening in late summer and to supporting the needs of the Maidenhead residential and business community. For more information about Vanguard Self Storage, please visit https://www.vanguardstorage.co.uk/. Building, Design & Construction Magazine | The Choice of Industry Professionals
McLaughlin & Harvey has completed the construction of a major new academic facility at the University of Edinburgh, marking another milestone in the ongoing transformation of the institution’s King’s Buildings Campus. The new Engineering Forum building, which will house the School of Engineering’s Institute for Energy Systems, provides 6,500 sq m of high-specification teaching and research space. Delivered via the SCAPE Scotland Framework, the five-storey, steel-framed development has been designed to support both advanced research and hands-on learning in key areas such as renewable energy, power systems and electronics. Positioned as a ‘living lab’, the building has been developed to facilitate real-world experimentation and innovation, enabling students and researchers to engage directly with emerging technologies. The facility reflects a growing emphasis within higher education on experiential learning environments that bridge the gap between academic study and industry application. The project also demonstrates the increasing role of modern construction techniques in delivering complex academic buildings within operational environments. Working within a live campus presented logistical challenges, requiring careful coordination to minimise disruption while maintaining programme efficiency. Dougie McCusker, construction director at McLaughlin & Harvey, highlighted the collaborative approach taken throughout the scheme, noting that close engagement with the University and design partners was key to delivering a high-quality outcome. He added that the project represents the contractor’s seventh development for the University of Edinburgh, underlining a long-standing relationship between the two organisations. The Engineering Forum forms part of a wider programme of investment across the King’s Buildings Campus, aimed at enhancing the University’s research capabilities and academic infrastructure. McLaughlin & Harvey has played a significant role in this transformation, having previously delivered the Nucleus Building, which opened in 2022, as well as contributing to other major schemes including the Usher Institute and the Roslin Innovation Centre. The completion of the new facility reinforces the continued investment in education-led development, with a focus on delivering future-ready environments that support innovation, sustainability and technical excellence. Building, Design & Construction Magazine | The Choice of Industry Professionals
Between December 2025 and February 2026, UK GDP grew by 0.5%; however, unlike services and production, which grew by 0.5% and 1.2% respectively, construction fell by 2.0%. Richard Beresford, Chief Executive of the National Federation of Builders (NFB), said: “The economy is in a stronger place than many presumed; however, growth in construction is proving elusive and where growth has occurred, it remains way below the 2023 baseline it is set against and in areas where public funding has been strong.” Over a three-month period, output in infrastructure and public works rose by 2.1%, but the highest growth was in private repair and maintenance, which grew by 6.7%. Output in all new housing fell by 2.5%, with productivity in new public housing hitting lows last seen in July 2019. This has coincided with a steady drop in monthly brick deliveries, a useful indicator for industry health, which were 34.5% lower relative to February 2019. Rico Wojtulewicz, Director of Policy and Market Insight at the NFB, said: “The winter period is when projects are gearing up for delivery, so growth is rarely certain. However, construction insolvency is up, brick deliveries are down and material prices continue to rise. Industry confidence remains low. It was very pleasing to see growth in private housing repair and maintenance, and it warrants further investigation into what the drivers were, as it could signal a green economy growth. The impact of the war in Iran has not yet been fed into the GDP figures, but industry is already expressing concerns. We would therefore hope that the Government’s proposed procurement and planning reforms are put into law as soon as possible, particularly those to support SMEs, such as the Medium sized site.” Building, Design & Construction Magazine | The Choice of Industry Professionals
Work has started in Hamilton to deliver 142 new homes, representing a £42 million investment from top 10 housebuilder Keepmoat. Set to transform the former Bell College site, Keepmoat will deliver a mixed tenure scheme, including 36 affordable homes in partnership with South Lanarkshire Council. The much needed development will offer a range of homes including apartments, terraced, semi-detached and detached houses, together with new pedestrian routes, public play areas and green spaces. Tim Metcalfe, Regional Managing Director at Keepmoat Scotland, said: “At Keepmoat we’re committed to breathing new life into brownfield sites and creating well-connected, multi-tenure communities and our significant investment at Hamilton is testament to that. “As a partnership-first housebuilder, we’re also proud to be delivering affordable homes alongside South Lanarkshire Council to create much-needed accessible options. It’s great to see work start on this site as it prepares to transform a disused area in the town.” The new site will provide 36 new council homes, including a number of homes for tenants with particular needs, and will be jointly funded by the council and the Scottish Government through their Affordable Housing Supply Programme funding. Stephen Gibson, Executive Director of Housing and Technical Resources at South Lanarkshire Council, added: “These affordable homes will be a welcome addition to the council’s housing stock and will help meet the varying needs of people across Hamilton. “We are determined to provide residents across the council area with high-quality homes, and that is exactly what will be provided through this partnership with Keepmoat. I am delighted to see the work beginning that will revitalise what has been a derelict site in a prime location and am looking forward to seeing the genuine difference it will bring to people’s lives.” The site was also formerly home to Hamilton Barracks before it was converted into a college and the Almada Street Campus sold by the University of the West of Scotland (UWS). Keepmoat is a top 10 UK partnership homebuilder with a track-record of delivering quality homes in regions across the UK. To date, Keepmoat has built over 35,000 homes, transforming brownfield sites into thriving new communities. For more information, please visit www.keepmoat.com. Building, Design & Construction Magazine | The Choice of Industry Professionals
Nearly half of Spacemaker’s installations run in freezer and cold storage environments, serving food, beverage, and pharmaceutical operators across the United States. Having completed nearly 50 cold storage facilities, you stop theorizing about what works and start knowing. Spacemaker has been deploying pallet shuttle systems in sub-zero, freezer-grade, and cold chain environments for over a decade. Nearly half of our 90+ installations operate in cold storage, from frozen food distribution to pharmaceutical cold chain to beverage production, across the United States. This is what those projects taught us. Lesson 1: The system that works at 20°C often does not work at -20°C This sounds obvious. It is not, until you watch a competitor’s system fail because a single lubricant wasn’t rated for deep freeze. Cold storage automation has a longer list of failure modes than ambient: battery chemistry degrades under sustained cold, encoder sensors misread through frost accumulation, structural components become brittle, and seals that perform perfectly in ambient warehouses fail within months in a freezer environment. Every Spacemaker system, the DualAxis Pro®, the Pallet Mole®, the QuadAxis Pro®, is engineered for operation down to -40°C / -40°F. That is a specification built from field experience in facilities where downtime is not a KPI problem; it becomes a product loss event. Lesson 2: Cold storage operators have less tolerance for downtime than anyone In a standard ambient warehouse, a system going offline for four hours is an operational disruption. In a -20°C freezer facility holding temperature-sensitive pharmaceutical goods or frozen food, it can mean product loss, compliance failures, and customer penalties. The operators we work with, companies like a leading food manufacturer, a major cold storage operator, a large meat processor, and a national beverage distributor, have zero tolerance for unexpected downtime. That pressure shaped how Spacemaker engineers redundancy into every deployment. Auto-return-on-low-battery, emergency stop systems, real-time status alerts through the MGM® fleet management platform, and remote diagnostics are not features we added because customers asked. They’re features we added because we saw what happens without them. Lesson 3: The hardest part of a cold storage installation is not the technology Spacemaker has completed nine installations across a major beverage distributor’s facilities across multiple US states. Each site is different. Different rack configurations, different ceiling heights, different floor conditions, different throughput requirements. What’s consistent across every one of them: the hardest part of the project is the transition. Existing operations in cold storage facilities rarely stop during an installation. Workers are moving pallets. Temperature zones need to be maintained. The integration of a new automated system has to happen around live operations, often in phases, in a -20°C environment where installation crews are working in limited shifts. We have learned to plan for the human and environmental complexity of cold storage, not just the mechanical one. Lesson 4: Forklift elimination changes everything in a freezer Every cold storage operator has the same workforce challenge: working in a freezer is physically demanding, turnover is high, and OSHA requirements add cost and complexity to every shift. Forklifts in cold aisles introduce risk, icy floors, reduced visibility in frost, slowed reaction times. When we remove forklifts from the cold aisle entirely, which is what our systems do, we are not just improving storage density. We are eliminating the leading source of injury risk in the facility, reducing the number of people who need to work in the cold, and improving throughput because the shuttle does not need a 10-minute warm-up break. Operators who came to us for ROI from density gains often find that the labor and safety story is a bigger return. Lesson 5: Four-way systems are under-deployed in cold storage, for now The majority of cold storage automation today is two-way pallet shuttle technology. The Pallet Mole® and DualAxis Pro® are built for exactly this: deep-lane, high-density, FIFO or LIFO storage. They’re proven, efficient, and the right tool for most cold storage applications. But cold chain is changing. Online grocery, meal kit distribution, and pharmaceutical cold chain have introduced SKU profiles that two-way systems are not optimized for, high SKU count, variable velocity, complex product rotation requirements. The QuadAxis Pro® handles those profiles better than any two-way system can. We are starting to see cold storage operators in frozen food distribution and pharmaceutical logistics ask questions they were not asking two years ago. That is a leading indicator. The next five years of cold storage automation deployments will look different from the last ten. What 50 Projects Taught Us, in Short Cold chain automation is not harder than ambient automation. It is more demanding, it asks more of the equipment, more of the installation team, and more of the design process. But it is also where automation delivers its highest value, because the environment makes every manual alternative more expensive, more dangerous, and less reliable. Every system we have put into cold storage has made the operators who run them faster, safer, and more capable than they were before. The result speaks for itself. Spacemaker Systems, Inc. is a full turnkey provider of pallet shuttle automation, with offices in Ocoee, Florida and Warwickshire, UK. To learn how Spacemaker approaches cold storage automation, visit spacemakerinc.com. Building, Design & Construction Magazine | The Choice of Industry Professionals