A fourth London tower moves to site

Bovis has signed the main construction contract for 60 Gracechurch Street, a 36-storey office tower in the City of London being developed by Sellar and its Japanese parent Obayashi, Building and Construction News reported this week. The deal is worth £385m, and marks the first major scheme Bovis has landed since Obayashi bought it out of Lendlease.

Bovis has been on the job since July 2025 doing pre-construction work, and main works are now starting with completion pencilled in for the end of 2029. Keltbray is handling demolition, piling and specialist engineering. William Hare has the structural steel package. The M&E work is split between Phoenix ME on electrical and ESG on mechanical, while Scheldebouw, part of the Permasteelisa group, takes the cladding. The team is targeting BREEAM Outstanding and a 5.5 star NABERS rating, a reminder of how far sustainability credentials have moved from nice to have to a tender requirement on prime City office space.

Why it matters

The job is a reminder that London's office pipeline, at least at the top end, hasn't stopped moving even while housebuilding struggles and output figures disappoint month after month. Sellar built its name on the Shard, and putting its weight behind another 36 floors in the Square Mile says something about where developers still see confidence: office space with the ratings and location that let occupiers justify the rent.

For Bovis specifically, this is the clearest sign yet that life under Obayashi means a fuller order book rather than a quieter one. A near four year build on a constrained City site needs a settled delivery team from day one, which is typically when a contractor starts recruiting rather than redeploying from elsewhere in the business.

What it means for your career

A job of this length and complexity, a logistics constrained City site, high sustainability targets, multiple specialist packages, needs the full range of commercial and delivery roles: senior quantity surveyors comfortable with complex M&E and facade packages, package managers who can run subcontractors like Keltbray and William Hare without friction, and site managers used to the choreography of a tight City footprint.

If you're a QS or project lead with City high rise experience, Bovis rebuilding its pipeline under new Japanese ownership is worth watching. Firms coming off an acquisition tend to hire in bursts once the first big scheme lands, both to staff the job itself and to build the bench for the next one. The same goes for the specialist trades on this job: steel, facade and M&E contractors with a 60 Gracechurch Street reference on their CV will carry weight on the next prime City tender.