Bruntwood SciTech has completed work on a new SMART building at Innovation Birmingham.

Enterprise Wharf, Birmingham's first truly SMART building, has reached completion marking a major milestone for Bruntwood SciTech, the UK’s leading developer of city-wide innovation ecosystems and specialist environments.

The EPC A rated, 10 storey, 120,000 sq ft building has been developed for innovative occupiers to offer an innately tech-enabled environment to its users. The embedded SMART building infrastructure will optimise user experience and wellbeing, reduce emissions and lower operational costs. Through its smart building blueprint, Enterprise Wharf can offer more than 90 user experiences across the building, creating a significantly improved environment and working experience than would typically be experienced in any other office space.

New technologies, including state-of-the-art 'Internet of Things' sensors, have been embedded throughout the building, forming a 'central nervous system' that will provide insights into people flow, energy usage and temperature within different areas of workspaces.

Where most buildings' systems work in independent silos, Enterprise Wharf will provide businesses with much greater visibility of what's happening in the building, with immediate access to data allowing for real-time response to any customer or visitor challenges that arise. For instance, businesses based in Enterprise Wharf can harness the data to optimise heating, lighting and air quality, which are all wirelessly and independently controlled, ultimately creating an enhanced workplace experience for occupants.

-- Advertisement --

To reduce the building's wider environmental impact, Demand Side Response technology has been incorporated to help alter the building’s electricity usage in real-time, so at times of stress on the main grid, or in response to network operator price signals, alternative sources or reduction in electricity can be implemented to help secure sustainable and affordable electricity. The building will also use air source heat pumps and significant solar panelling to aid its ESG objectives.

Other key features of the landmark gateway building into Birmingham city centre are a large, open plan reception and collaboration space, cycle storage, space for electric vehicle charging, showers and a private roof garden with stunning views over the city. New external landscaping offers a new green space at the campus, providing direct, much improved access to the adjacent Birmingham and Fazeley Canal.

Businesses taking advantage of Enterprise Wharf’s SMART Grade A workspace will also benefit from its location within Bruntwood SciTech’s Innovation Birmingham campus, the West Midlands’ largest dedicated tech and digital cluster which provides coworking, serviced, and larger leased office space along with specialist business support for digital and tech businesses to help them form, scale and grow. The completion doubles the capacity of Innovation Birmingham, which is home to more than 120 start-ups, scale-ups and global businesses across fintech, cyber security, AR, VR, blockchain, sports tech, edtech, and other tech and digital sub-sectors.

The milestone for Enterprise Wharf follows Bruntwood SciTech’s recent announcement that it has secured a further £500m of investment and welcomed a third investor to the partnership, Greater Manchester Pension Fund (GMPF), alongside existing partners Bruntwood and Legal & General. This is the first direct and active investment by a local authority pension fund into a UK-wide science, tech and innovation specialist property platform.

The new investment makes Bruntwood SciTech the largest dedicated property platform serving the UK’s innovation economy, and it has plans to create a £5 billion UK-wide portfolio that can support 2,600 high-growth businesses by 2032. A significant increase in investment from Legal & General and Bruntwood has been made through cash and asset transfer, whilst GMPF has injected £150 million that will support the UK’s target to become a global science and technology superpower by 2030. In the West Midlands the new capital will be used to expand the Innovation Birmingham and Birmingham Health Innovation campuses, undertake redevelopment projects of its city centre innovation hubs, and enter additional R&D intensive locations across the region, delivering much-needed additional world-leading lab and office space.

The city centre locations that have now joined the Bruntwood SciTech portfolio include Cornerblock, Cornwall Buildings, Mclaren, and Centre City and become part of a city-wide innovation ecosystem for Birmingham.