SES Engineering Services (SES) has been awarded a place on a key £20 million commercial development in Newcastle upon Tyne.

One Strawberry Lane, as the development will be known, is set to become the new six-storey headquarters for The Home Group housing association, also acting as a support hub for the city's voluntary sector.

During the first stage of the tender for the project, SES partnered with developer, Ask Real Estate (Ask) and BAM as principal contractor, providing cost advice and buildability support. Following confirmation of Ask as preferred developer, SES was appointed to provide the full range of MEP services design with M&E consultants, CAD 21, delivering the design on behalf of SES.

Designed by Ryder Architecture, the building is expected to achieve a BREEAM Excellent and EPC rating of A. The SES team will be drawing on its previous experience gained on similar projects, in this case, drawing heavily on its building physics capability, which will be just one of the ways that the stringent standards will be achieved as SES' Managing Director, Steve Joyce said: "This will be a fully co-ordinated scheme using BIM with SES producing working drawings throughout. While the exacting sustainability standards required are challenging, because they translate into a minimum 25% betterment of Part L regulations, our collaborative approach to services design and our early engagement with the project team and client should ensure we achieve the required building performance outputs."


SES has recently started on site, with a planned handover at the end of May 2022.

SES will be installing a Hybrid VRF heat recovery system for heating and cooling together with a Q-ton air source heat pump for producing the domestic hot water, along with roof-mounted photovoltaics.

With a build programme expected to support an estimated 400 construction and supply chain jobs throughout the project, Tony Fitzgerald, construction director for BAM in the North East, said: "Building One Strawberry Lane for Home Group is the latest chapter in our long history of delivering some of the region’s finest buildings. We have created industry-leading safety standards for our construction teams and with the tight city-centre footprint and its location adjacent to the Nexus Metro Tunnel, we have used our digital experience and tools to safely design and plan the works."