British Land announces major life sciences plans for Canada Water

theguardian.com:

A stack of factory-made modular labs, with a roof terrace and grass growing on top, has sprung up at Canada Water in south-east London and is due to open in late May.

With growing demand for lab space, the company behind them, British Land, is unveiling plans for a large new research building on Monday, part of a nascent life sciences cluster south of the Thames.

The FTSE 100 property developer and the Australian pension fund AustralianSuper have appointed London-based Stanton Williams Architects to design a 300,000 square foot life sciences building, the size of five football pitches. It will house wet labs that can handle various types of chemicals, and other research and development facilities.

Stanton Williams recently completed a research centre for Great Ormond Street hospital in London and won the Stirling Prize for its Sainsbury Laboratory in Cambridge, an independently funded research institute within the School of Biological Sciences.

There is an acute shortage of lab space in the “golden triangle” – Oxford, Cambridge and London – prompting British Land to create 30,000 sq ft (2,800 sq metres) of modular lab space in Canada Water, against the backdrop of the Canary Wharf towers.

The fully kitted-out labs, made from steel and composite materials, are bolted together and stacked – like a Meccano set, according to Emma Cariaga, joint head of Canada Water at British Land. They are manufactured by Premier Modular in east Yorkshire.

Called the Paper Yard, the labs have taken just nine months to build and will be ready by the end of May. British Land is talking to a number of life science firms interested in taking space. Cariaga said there could be a single let by a larger company, but it was more likely that between six