Media City, Salford: This is the BBC

In the next few weeks, the BBC will reach an important milestone in its big move north. The corporation is moving some programme-making departments to the £500m media city in Salford in an attempt to make it less London-centric, and the first of three studios is due to be handed over by Bovis Lend Lease. This will house BBC Sport and Radio Five Live; the others will be completed over the next six months and will accommodate BBC North West and children’s programmes.

It’s been a slog getting to this stage. The lure of the jobs and money that the development would bring drew interest not just from Salford, but from Manchester, its bigger, more sophisticated neighbour. Then, in June 2006, the BBC announced it was awarding preferred bidder status to Peel Holdings, the developer of MediaCityUk (as it brands itself), leaving media types frantically trying to find out where exactly Salford was.

Because the BBC wanted to be up and running at the beginning of 2011, Peel started work immediately, despite no contract having been signed. “The BBC gave us a date of December 2010 for completion,” says David Glover, Peel’s construction director. “We became the preferred bidder and took significant risk with the design to close the deal with the BBC. It was a risk worth taking.”

Peel got to sign the contract a year later, but there was almost immediately another obstacle to overcome. At the eleventh-hour the BBC said it didn’t like the concept design and wanted another architect. The team took this in its stride, but building a £500m “city” consisting of studios, homes, a university, offices and a hotel in just three years is a tall order at the best of times. How have Bovis and Peel tackled the job?

Getting in early

The two firms have a longstanding relationship going back over 26 projects. The upshot of is that they trust each other, and that the contractor is involved right from the start, so it can influence the design to ensure it is cost-effective and buildable. The job is being done under a management contract, which means the detailed design is worked up at the same time as construction. But before a single sod was turned Bovis was suggesting ways of saving money and time.

An example of this was the decision to scrap the original plans for the plant room. “The consultants said: ‘Let’s have basements for the plant,” says Dennis

Bate, a Bovis director. “We said no, as it was a contaminated site and it’s expensive to dispose of material these days. It is also next to a canal and there would be issues with water ingress. The other significant risk was that it could have put three months on the programme and it was already very tight.” Peel agreed: the basements were taken out, and the plant was relocated to the roof – a decision that saved “millions”, according to Bovis.

The other big influence Bovis had on the design was the location of the energy centre. This was going to be at one end of the development on a dedicated site. “We said this was ridiculous as it was a prime site,” says Martin Gregory, Bovis’ operations director. “We suggested it could go under the car park. Peel said, ‘That’s a good idea, can you make it work?’ All we did was put an extra floor on the car park.”

A question of timing

This job started back in construction’s gold rush days. “The market was booming at the time,” says Bate, “and that was a massive challenge. We had to identify what the risks were and find ways of overcoming them.”

The BBC wanted it’s three studios and production buildings ready by the end of 2009, which would give it time to do the technical fit-out so the studios could go live in 2011. This was going to be too much for Bovis to cope with. “To build and commission three buildings all at once was an enormous task. We would have had a huge peak in labour, then a big fall-off, and the commissioning would have been a nightmare,” says Bate.

Instead, Bovis suggested bringing forward one building by three months, to October 2009, in return for handing over the second building as originally planned at the end of 2009 and the third building in March 2010. “It meant we could balance the workforce and get better competitive tendering and delivery,” says Bate. “I suggested this on the Friday and they had agreed it by the Monday.”

Keeping costs under control and ensuring there were enough people to do the work was also crucial for ensuring timely delivery. The team followed a strategy of not relying on one supplier for any element of the project. The scheme has been divided up into five “clusters”, each with its own architect. Two service engineers were engaged.

Bovis was particularly nervous about the cladding package because it had seen the delays caused to other projects when Schmidlin went bust in early 2006. Bovis decided to go for an off-the-shelf system from one supplier so it could get a bulk deal, and have it installed by three contractors. “We didn’t want one on the job because if they went out of business it would be a major problem,” says Bate. It went for a system supplied by Schüco that was used across the site, including the BBC studio designed by Chapman Taylor and redesigned by Wilkinson Eyre when the BBC rejected the Chapman Taylor’s concept design.

Bovis also did bulk deals for concrete, lighting, plasterboard and doors.

Saved by the downturn

The project is now in full swing, with 1,950 workers on site dealing with up to 400 deliveries a day. Apart from the tight programme, Bovis say working next to water has been tricky for health and safety reasons, and keeping water out of the deep drainage works has been challenging, too. The studios are very technical buildings and sorting out the site’s prodigious need for power has also been a big job.

Yet the project is going well. Ironically, Peel has been helped by the downturn. Initially it looked as though the scheme would go over budget because of rampant construction inflation but this is no longer an issue. “It was quite scary – the budgets were 18 months old when we started and we couldn’t control the prices, which had gone up 20%,” says Glover. “Now things have balanced out. That is why I say we are doing well with the budgets. If things had carried on the way they were going, we’d have been in a horrible place. The market was moving in a way that nobody could predict and was unsustainable.”

If the project continues to run as smoothly as it has up to now, we can expect to see Blue Peter and Match of the Day coming live from Salford in 2011.