What happened

Royal London has appointed Bowmer & Kirkland as main contractor to transform its offices at 1 Thistle Street and 2 Queen Street into a new Edinburgh headquarters, Building reported this week. The scheme, designed by Morgan Architects and granted planning permission last November, will create a 108,000 sq ft building able to hold up to 1,600 staff, with an auditorium, a café, collaboration space, roof terraces and cycle facilities. Around 70 per cent of the existing buildings will be reused rather than demolished, a choice Royal London's chief operating officer has framed as a deliberate decision to retrofit rather than replace. Work is due to start imminently, with completion scheduled for 2029. The contract value has not been disclosed.

Why it matters

This is a sizeable, multi-year commercial retrofit landing in Edinburgh at a point when the city's office pipeline has been thinner than London's or Manchester's. Retaining 70 per cent of the existing structure rather than demolishing it is also the direction most corporate occupiers are now being pushed in, by embodied carbon targets as much as cost, and it is a model other Scottish city-centre landlords will be watching for how Bowmer & Kirkland sequences the retrofit around a live office building. A four-year commercial job of this size gives the firm's Scottish operation a solid pipeline anchor through the back half of the decade, at a time when several contractors have been scaling back regional offices rather than growing them.

What it means for careers and hiring

A scheme like this needs a full site team mobilised in Edinburgh over the next few months: project managers, site managers, M&E coordinators and commercial staff with retrofit and refurbishment experience, not just new-build. Retaining most of the existing structure makes this a harder technical build than a ground-up office, so contractors and subcontractors with genuine occupied-building and heritage-retrofit experience will be the ones Bowmer & Kirkland and its supply chain are hunting for, and that experience travels well into the wider wave of office retrofit work now underway across UK city centres. For quantity surveyors and project managers based in Scotland who have been watching London and Manchester take the bulk of the recent commercial office pipeline, this is a reason to keep half an eye on Edinburgh, and on Bowmer & Kirkland's Scottish bench in particular, over the next year as the team builds out.