The Coachworks Arcade regeneration

Chester Northgate is Cheshire West and Chester Council’s regeneration of a quarter of the city’s historic centre: an indoor market of independent traders, a six-screen Picturehouse cinema, restaurants and bars including Cosy Club and the Florist, co-working offices and a multi-storey car park, reached through a restored heritage frontage. It opened in 2022.

A scheme like this is really many buildings sharing one set of services. Each tenant came with its own Agreement for Lease and its own demands, from a cinema to a fish counter to a floor of offices, and several weren’t fully designed when the core had to be.

The site added its own limits. It sits on Roman archaeology, with a cap on how much ground could be disturbed, so services had to find routes that didn’t break through that plane, and the floors step up a sloping site rather than sitting on one level. Coordinating MEP risers and routes through a multi-storey, multi-use building under those conditions was where the work sat.

Working at BIM Level 2 across a site this congested kept the coordination honest, with services, structure and tenant zones modelled together before installation.