Cobalt Business Park

North Tyneside, United Kingdom

Cobalt Business Park is the largest office park in the UK. It has more than 1.5 million sq ft of office space. The park has attracted big names in the business world, so far bringing around 9,500 jobs to the area. The project is still ongoing and a further 1 million sq ft is planned for the future.

Cundall has been involved in this project since 1996 and was appointed to perform civil, structural, geotechnical and transportation services on the sites. From the outset, Cundall realised that there were numerous challenges which had to be overcome, including:

• five disused mine shafts
• a number of above ground power supply cables crossing the site
• restrictions on surface water discharge

Due to the long-term nature of this project, the work was carried out in a number of phases. The first phase of construction works involved the provision of basic infrastructure, which had to be designed and detailed in order to offer maximum flexibility to allow for potential changes to the development masterplan.

The development is a good example of how engineers working on long-term developments must be adaptable to constantly changing market demands and technical innovations. To date, all of the Cobalt plots have been delivered on budget and on programme through successful project management and team collaboration.

The developments at Cobalt have changed in order to recognise the changing legislation and sustainability requirements of building end users. This has enabled the more recent developments to achieve a BREEAM 'Excellent' rating.