Watchmoor Point is a reinvention project which shows how refurbishments can produce incredible high-performing buildings, and that all types of buildings can meet more ambitious sustainability goals with the right team behind them.

In turning these 1990s warehouse buildings into a more sustainable, valuable asset, our client (Legal & General Investment Management, Real Assets (LGIMRA)), set out to create modern, desirable workplaces which would support their commitments to sustainable development.

Our priorities included not just cutting embodied and operational carbon, but also ethical supply chain management, occupant wellbeing and active travel facilities.

TFT delivered this refurbishment project by taking a detailed and innovative approach to specifying and procuring materials, leading a collaborative effort from the whole project team.

Lifecycle carbon and ethical procurement

Our specialists oversaw the project to interrogate the credentials and certifications of each product used in the refurbishment, prioritising Environmental Performance Declarations and using One Click LCA(Life Cycle Analysis) carbon database to understand the carbon impacts across the board.

We weighed this data against material provenance, occasionally adopting materials with greater embodied carbon but clearer assurances for ethical sourcing.

We also pushed back against industry norms which don’t align with low-carbon projects, analysing every element of the build to take a holistic view of carbon reduction. Among many decisions, we declined to paint the floor slab on Unit 2C, which alone saved about 1.35% of that building's embodied carbon!

Accounting for occupier emissions and costs, we removed gas from the building and installed virtually full-cover PV (256 panels, producing over 77,0000 kWh per year) along with a replacement roof. The result was a below-zero carbon building achieving an EPC A+.

In all, our efforts delivered a market-leading refurbishment with upfront embodied carbon of just 181kg/CO2e, compared to our benchmark of350kg/CO2e.

Meanwhile, operational energy is at 28kwh/year, compared to our 40kwh/year benchmark.

A journey of continual improvement

We applied our learnings from previous work across Legal & General’s office portfolio development and refurbishment projects in recent years, which are defined by high standards of employee experience, wellbeing and productivity-enhancing features. In turn, the successful innovations and lessons learned from this project have already been implemented on subsequent successful industrial refurbishments, amplifying the impacts of all these decisions across many buildings to come.

We understand that people who work in buildings with high ESG credentials take pride in their work and their workplace, and we know that full support for active travel modes, and dedicated spaces to relax and socialise away from the core workplace are essential.

These features set Watchmoor Point apart in the industrial or logistics sector, making the park a perfect destination for occupiers with ESG high on their agenda, who don't want to compromise on high quality spaces.

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