Transforming a 1990s Oldham shopping mall

Not disturbing the shoppers is just one of the challenges facing Willmott Dixon as it turns the 30-year-old Spindles mall into a modern, mixed-use space

Nothing seems out of the ordinary when Construction News visits the Spindles shopping complex in Oldham on a balmy day in November. Christmas shoppers animatedly push trolleys from Boots to B&M, unaware that just a few feet away Wilmott Dixon is stripping the 30-year-old building back to its bones.

Oldham Council, which is spearheading Spindles’ redevelopment, forbade the contractor from disrupting businesses during construction work. Since starting on site in November 2022, Willmott Dixon has repeatedly erected and demolished drylined firewall barriers to shield shoppers from the hammering and drilling.

Work is beginning to wrap up on the three-phase £67m development. Phase one, which involved converting the first floor of the shopping centre into 7,000 square metres of offices for 800 public sector staff, was the first to complete. Phase three sits above it, transforming the second floor of the former Debenhams store into speculative office space for about 300 workers.

Phase two is a more traditional new-build project, although it uses part of the structure of the incumbent building, previously occupied by discount retailer TJ Hughes. The steel-framed building, which connects directly with the existing structure, will house an events space, archive and market hall. At the time of CN’s visit, phase two’s shell had been completed and phase three was in the commissioning phase.

Night shifts

Though a handsome building that opened relatively recently in 1991, Spindles was a victim of the drift towards online shopping, exacerbated by Covid. By the time the council bought the site in November 2020, 30 per cent of the units were vacant. But the council saw another pandemic trend – the shift towards more flexible forms of working – and seized on the opportunity.

At the time, council staff occupied a 1970s concrete tower, complete with its own nuclear bunker. As working from home became the norm, the local authority explored moving its operations to a smaller, city-centre location. Converting Spindles’ largely unoccupied first floor into modern council offices would have the dual benefit of creating a better work environment for staff and bringing people back into the town centre.

“Having staff in that upper area who will buy a sandwich or a drink at lunch makes [the shopping centre] far busier than it was before,” says Chris Lewis, the council’s assistant director of creating a better place. “Then, as people come in and see it getting busier, other businesses feel more confident to move to the area.”

This is not a light-touch refurbishment. Willmott Dixon started phase one by stripping the interior back to its shell and assessing the guts. The team found that the building was rapidly leaking heat and that most of the services were nearing end of life. “We basically painted over the concrete soffit and started over,” says Willmott Dixon senior operations manager Chris Baker.

Willmott Dixon knocked through the walls separating the former Debenhams, H&M and Disney stores using a Brokk 60 Demolition robot. Once the area had been opened up, the contractor punched holes for nine windows and a strip of curtain walling into the external walls. The team propped the openings up with Mabey hire temporary props before installing glazing with a 600kg Awovolift 300 vacuum lifter.

The existing structure had a paltry amount of insulation, so Willmott Dixon added new internal walling with mineral wool insulation infill and installed a Daikin MVHR system.

Willmott Dixon handed over phase one in December 2023. Council staff are already in their new digs, which when CN visits hosts a few Christmas trees donated by Willmott Dixon.

Because of its success, Willmott Dixon won the project’s £7m third phase – 3,000 square metres of speculative Cat B office space, sitting directly above the council office. The team was able to extend the existing scaffolding upwards and replicate the work it had done on the floor below.

The concourse outside these offices has also been transformed, with steel and glass railings with timber handrails, Altro vinyl flooring and curtain walling office frontage. Willmott Dixon took out 16 escalators, cutting off public access to the council workspace and creating direct views from the ground floor of Oldham artist Brian Clarke’s stained-glass jewel-toned rooflights.

These works took place right in the middle of the public walkway – soundproofing barriers weren’t an option here. Instead, Willmott Dixon consulted with its supply chain. Stott Demolition, M&E firm Dalkia, partioning firm RapidFix and groundworks firm WDC agreed to work night shifts to avoid disrupting shopping.

New-build

There is another slab of drylined firewall to the site’s east when CN visits. On the other side is phase two of the project. A branch of TJ Hughes is being demolished and replaced by a new building housing a food court, multi-use events space and an archive for Oldham’s local studies collection.

The MEA (Market, Events and Archive) building, as it is currently known, is mostly new-build rather than retrofit. After studying the building, architect AEW concluded it had the wrong bones to support its intended use – the floor-to-floor heights were too low and the column grid too close. In any case, the level of structural intervention needed to make it work would still have required a lot of demolition.

Not that opting for a new-build made Willmott Dixon’s task any easier. The contractor originally planned to construct the MEA building first, but had to reverse the schedule after running into two problems: an errant substation and what Baker calls the “phantom mine”.

Willmott Dixon was poised to demolish a substation that occupied the site, when network operator Electricity North West informed it that it supplied the whole of Oldham town centre. Before any work could start, the contractor had to build two new substations and work out how to safely divert 150 metres of high-voltage network.

Around the same time, the Coal Authority warned there might be a disused mine on the site up to 300 metres deep. The whole building risked collapse if the shaft was later disturbed. The team spent a few months looking for it, but it never turned up, and the Coal Authority accepted that there probably wasn’t one, after all. However, Oldham’s mining past still impacted groundworks, with specialist grout required to secure the coal seams running beneath.

Once the area had been cleared, piling subcontractor Van Elle drove 391 piles a cumulative total of 2,237 linear metres deep. Of those, 213 were 450mm diameter controlled flight-auger piles and 178 sectional flight auger piles, some 300mm and others 450mm.

The superstructure is a 416-tonne steel frame, carrying 547 cubic metres of mesh reinforced concrete on a metal deck and accommodating steel framing system infills to the envelope substrate. When CN visits, facade subcontractor Longworth is covering the protruding box with 1,282 square metres of burnt orange Euramax shingle cladding. The box sits on a layer of load-bearing grey brick, which retains the steep gradient of Parliament Square, where the building sits.

Internally, the remaining parts of the existing structure needed a lot of work in preparation for the building’s new life. A lift shaft had to be completely deconstructed and rebuilt to make it wide enough to fit archive materials and other large goods for the market and events functions.

Meanwhile, the structurally weak, heavily serviced waffle slab construction of the remaining parts of the frame made installing new services difficult. “They’ve been drilling for five days,” says Willmott Dixon construction manager Sophie Nolan, gesturing at some of subcontractor Global Systems’ workers, patiently holding their drills aloft. “They have to stop all the time because they keep on hitting rebar.”

Despite the challenges, Willmott Dixon is on track to hand over the new community-facing building in May 2025. By then, the firm’s work will finally be in full view for the people of Oldham.