Mallory & Irvine, Wirral

Forming part of the Birkenhead 2040 framework, Mallory & Irvine marked a significant milestone in the regeneration of Birkenhead and the creation of a new business and leisure quarter in the heart of the town.

Led by Wirral Growth Company, a joint venture between Wirral Council and Muse Developments, the scheme delivered 150,000 sq ft of Grade A office accommodation across two five-storey buildings.

The BREEAM Excellent development combined high-quality modern workspace with distinctive architecture, strong sustainability credentials and a commitment to creating lasting social and economic benefits for the local community.

The two buildings feature contrasting façades, with one finished in traditional brickwork and the other incorporating a distinctive bespoke terracotta cladding system.

As a novel façade solution, the terracotta system was carefully developed, tested and refined with the specialist supply chain to ensure buildability, quality and efficient installation. Early design development and collaboration across the wider project also helped improve buildability, programme certainty and overall project efficiency.

Mallory & Irvine was an early adopter of Morgan Sindall’s CarboniCa carbon calculation model, enabling carbon to be considered alongside cost, programme and buildability as the design developed.

CarboniCa was used to identify and assess opportunities for reducing embodied carbon, helping the project team make informed, lower-carbon choices throughout design and procurement. This approach contributed to significant savings against the project’s original carbon baseline and supported the delivery of two BREEAM Excellent buildings.

The project provided an important opportunity to ensure investment in the town created benefits beyond the buildings themselves.

Working closely with Wirral Council and Muse Developments, we developed a social value strategy around identified local priorities and the particular socio-economic challenges facing communities across the Wirral. This allowed activity to be targeted where it could have the greatest impact, with three principal areas of focus:

• Creating Wirral’s future workforce
• Supporting care leavers
• Generating sustainable business growth

A key part of this was our educational partnership with Wirral Met College, helping ensure local students could benefit directly from a major construction project taking place in their community. We co-branded our onsite Knowledge Quad training and learning facility with the college, creating a dedicated environment where students could engage with the project and learn directly from our teams and specialist supply chain.