Office of the month: No.4 St Paul’s Square
THE glamorous bash thrown by English Cities Fund (ECF) last month to open the £32m No.4 St Paul’s Square building in Liverpool is perhaps a reminder of more opulent times in the sector.
Hundreds of people attended a lunch held on the top floor of the building, reminiscent of the type of events which became de rigeur a few years ago but are now only all-too rare.
Perhaps this explains why ECF managed to attract so many dignatories to the launch, including ECF’s chairman Sir Michael Lyons, Lord Heseltine, Liverpool City Council leader Joe Anderson and chief executive Ged Fitzgerald. After all, it seems unlikely that a building of this stature and ambition will be built within the city’s commercial district in the foreseeable future.
No. 4 St Paul’s Square is the final piece of a jigsaw which English Cities Fund’s chairman Sir Michael Lyons said had been ten years in the making.
“There wasn’t a great deal of competition for St Paul’s Square when we came on the scene. It was a complex project to put together and we’ve done that through rather challenging times.”
The most obvious indicator of this is that the 109,000 sq ft building has opened without any tenants, although rumours continue to circulate about major potential occupiers from the financial services sector. The building also needed £8.8m of NWDA and ERDF funding.
Still, joint letting agents GVA and CBRE will no doubt have appreciated the chance to show off the building and its impressive views stretching over the north of the city on one site and over its docklands on the other.
The building has has been developed with a central core to provide a column-free layout with floor-to-ceiling windows.
No.4 is split over ground and seven floors and contains many features such as a bespoke reception desk, high quality fixtures.
Sir Michael Lyons praised the project’s architects, RHWL, which has already developed the four previous schemes dominated by office buildings but also containing an 11-storey residential block.
“It is clear that they’ve bought care to each individual building so that we’ve ended up with something that is a rather rich addition to the landscape rather than something rather same-y,” he said.
Darran Lawless, director of Muse Developments (which is one of three partners in English Cities Fund alongside Legal & General and the Homes & Communities Agency), has spent much of the past decade working on the project. He argued that the building “has set new standards in terms of architecture, design, quality and sustainability”.
Indeed, in terms of the quality of newly-built space available in the city, perhaps only the nearby 20 Chapel St is comparable. 
Lawless said that No.4 St Paul’s Square is the only only speculatively-built office project on Merseyside to achieve a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating.
This has meant the inclusion of intelligent lighting and building energy management systems, air-source heat pumps and a green roof garden.
Moreover, a 24% reduction on building target carbon emissions was achieved during construction, which was completed on time and to budget.
The quoting rent for the building is £21.50 per sq ft.
