”They wanted us to do something different. It’s not so much the numbers or targets you want to hit, but the benefit for the community.”

Lee Askey heads Morgan Sindall’s project team on a landmark project for the London Borough of Hackney. It is a huge project for the council, worth nearly £100m and comprising a four-storey leisure centre and 1,100-pupil school in a compact inner-city residential space, on the perimeter of Shoreditch Park. 

The leisure centre will replace the existing Britannia Leisure Centre, which will be demolished once the new building and academy are completed. The old centre had become too expensive to maintain and the mayor of Hackney said a refurbishment project would cost up to £14m and require the site to close for two years making that approach unviable.

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