What is your focus on at British Land right now?
I lead on environmental sustainability at British Land. I work across development projects, making sure they’re designed and built to operate efficiently and include efficiency in their initial construction as well. I also work with our existing portfolio to look at how we retrofit and re-imagine buildings to make them low carbon, but also remain relevant and useful in today’s market as well.
There’s lots going on at British Land in London right now – Canada Water is a huge masterplan in South London, with new high street, parks and offices. We are currently in the planning process for the high profile Euston Tower development, and we own three other campuses; Broadgate, on top of Liverpool Street Station, Paddington Central, at Paddington, and Regents Place, right next to Regents Park.
How our climate targets informing your approach to development?
The next 10 years are critical for our sector, in terms of decarbonisation and tackling climate change. Our main challenge is developing low embodied carbon buildings. Material reuse rates are low, and where we do need new materials, we’re heavily reliant on our supply chain for innovation and developing low carbon products.
We must do more to reuse and stimulate a second-hand materials market. We should be considering buildings as a as a materials bank and starting to share materials across projects. We need different reuse pathways for different materials and components. We’re in the early stages of it in this country, the Dutch and the Nordics are way ahead of us!
Could you talk a bit about how Madaster will support you in this?
We are currently using Madaster on a couple of our key office development projects. That’s where we think we’ve seen the best application for it.
Data is super important, for both embodied carbon and operational carbon. With our materials passport work, we’re trying to apply a digital layer to the instructions for a building both now and in the future. The Madaster platform allows us to store and capture key data in a useful format for future generations.
Effective data and information capture is also critical for the short term, in particular the elements of a building that turn over more often, such as the mechanical engineering. And then an even shorter term, are tenant fit outs – the furniture, the plasterboard, the partition walls, the doors, the ironmongery, the lockers etc. Madaster will help us to capture that information and make it useful for planning the repair, reuse, or recycling of those elements.
It’s early days, but what outcomes are you starting to see from using the platform?
Where we’ve applied it on One Broadgate, our development near Liverpool Street Station, it’s improved the way the teams are thinking and designing for longevity. Because we’re asking them to capture different data and think about the future in a different way, it’s forcing a new mindset. We are still in an adjustment phase as an industry, for where we are now, Madaster is particularly useful as an educational and engagement process.
Is there any advice that you’d give to your peers who are looking to start out on this journey, based on what you’ve learned so far?
Start! We’re never going to have a second-hand materials market until enough people get on board. We need to have a visible pipeline for when materials are going to become available, to start lining up different development timelines.
Getting a good BIM model and naming conventions is also useful, spend time with the main contractor and their BIM team to define how you want to record and collate shared data. And, engage with a platform like Madaster from the early stages of design, so you have data transparency from the start – transparency is key!
Get in touch if you’d like to hear how Madaster can help you.
