Background

Student Castle is a leading provider of student accommodation across the UK. Since 2010, Student Castle have opened schemes in Bristol, Cambridge, Cardiff, Edinburgh, London, Manchester, Newcastle and York each one tailored to the city and its students. An additional three sites are under construction in Durham, Oxford and Brighton completing in 2019/20 respectively.

Student Castle places great emphasis on securing the most suitable and sustainable locations for their prospective students, and also provide accommodation which is designed and managed in a way that meets the needs of students on-site.

This allows prospective students the opportunity to live in modern and safe accommodation within close proximity to their college or university, whilst also ensuring that students get the most out of their university experience. Student Castle has shown innovation within this sector with an extremely high standard of accommodation in a variety of contemporary layouts that respond well to the needs of the 21st Century student.

An MPS & Student Castle Project

MPS worked in partnership with Student Castle to develop the new student accommodation development in Durham city centre. The 473-bed student accommodation block features communal living areas, a cinema, bar, laundry, retail space, gym, common rooms, games area, office space and study space.

The scheme is constructed over 8 floors and each bedroom (studio) has a prefabricated bathroom pod.

MPS worked on the £2.7 million project over a 16 month period to deliver:

• External structural steel framing, cement particle boarding to the framing and insulation works
• Internal partitions, dry lining and plastering works
• Suspended ceilings
• Decoration works

Results

MPS successfully worked to deliver this project on time and within budget. Though there were some challenges that meant to the team had to work innovatively to ensure the project ran smoothly alongside the main contractors’ activities.

This scheme sits outside MPS’ core business activities which meant the team had to source all of our labour externally, so they didn’t affect in-house works. The location of the site also meant the team faced delivery constraints for the materials needed for the project.

"All deliveries had to come on flat bed artic wagons and be craned from the back using the onsite crane, which meant deliveries were a military operation. We also had to work in and around the deliveries of the bathroom pods for each studio. We had to co-ordinate the logistics with our client to ensure the pods were in place before our materials were delivered. Though it has been a challenging project, we’re delighted to have delivered it within the set timeframes and budget."

Gareth Park,

MPS Project Manager

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