What happened

Mellior Group, working as in-house contractor for developer Bentry Capital, has been awarded the full £21m construction contract for Angel Village, a conversion of a former office building off City Road in Islington into 130 one-, two- and three-bedroom apartments, London Post and The Construction Index reported this week. The scheme is being delivered in phases, with 88 homes in the first phase.

Work started with an office strip-out in September 2025 on an 18-month programme, with fit-out under way since January 2026. The job includes removing the original curtain walling to add green wall facades, taking out the existing staircase and carrying out minor structural alterations, alongside new underground parking, landscaped gardens and a concierge. Mellior has ten of its own staff on the job, with 40 operatives on site daily and up to 120 expected at peak. First owners are expected to move in during 2027.

Why it matters

Angel Village is a clear example of a trend that's becoming a real segment of the London market in its own right: converting redundant office stock into housing rather than building new. With office vacancy still elevated in parts of central London and housing supply squeezed, developers are increasingly looking at existing buildings as the fastest route to a viable scheme, especially where planning is more straightforward than a ground-up build.

That shift changes the shape of the work available. A conversion job like this one isn't a conventional new-build programme, it's structural alteration, facade replacement, extensive M&E requalification and fit-out, all inside an occupied urban site with limited laydown space. Contractors who can run that kind of scheme well are becoming more valuable relative to those set up purely for greenfield new-build.

What it means for your career

If you're a site manager, project surveyor or M&E lead with experience on conversion or heavy refurbishment schemes, rather than pure new-build, that experience is becoming more marketable in London specifically. Retrofit and conversion work demands a different skill set: surveying existing structures accurately, sequencing strip-out and fit-out around live neighbouring occupiers, and managing the facade and M&E risk that comes with buildings that weren't designed for their new use.

For QS and commercial staff, conversion schemes also tend to carry more contractual and technical risk than new-build, which usually means more scope for value-add work and variations, a useful thing to understand and price for if you're negotiating your next role or day rate. And if you're earlier in your career and weighing which contractor to join, a firm building a track record in office-to-residential conversion, as Mellior now is with this scheme, is worth watching as the office-to-homes pipeline in London continues to grow.