2 Finsbury Avenue — Broadgate, City of London

The largest single development British Land has ever put on its Broadgate campus replaced two 1980s buildings with three connected volumes: a 37-storey east tower at 156 metres, a 21-storey west tower, and a 12-storey podium that stitches them together. William Hare started erecting a 10,000-tonne steel frame in August 2024. The structure topped out at level 37 in January 2026 with a final concrete pour and an evergreen bough.

Project Scope

Roughly 750,000 sq ft across the three volumes, with about 83,000 sq m of office space, 700 sq m of retail and 2,100 sq m given over to a learning use at ground level. Denmark’s 3XN drew a faceted sawtooth facade that carries double-height floor plates, with Adamson Associates as executive architect and Ramboll on structures and services. Sir Robert McAlpine holds the main contract, reported at around £500 million. The building runs all-electric with no gas connection, and the design targets BREEAM Outstanding, WELL Platinum, an EPC A rating and NABERS 5-star, plus net zero carbon in both construction and operation.

Why It Matters

Speculative office towers of this size stopped penciling in most markets after 2022. This one went ahead anyway, and then Citadel and Citadel Securities pre-let more than 250,000 sq ft, one of the largest City pre-lets of the cycle. That single deal is the flight-to-quality thesis in one transaction: tenants aren’t taking less space so much as taking better space, and they’ll commit years ahead of completion to get it. For contractors, the interesting part is the delivery model. A 10,000-tonne steel frame with a triangulated facade over an operating campus is a logistics problem before it’s an engineering one, and McAlpine sequenced it around a live estate that never shut. Completion is set for 2027.

Project Team & Details