EDGE London Bridge — London

ATOL Construction was appointed to apply fire protection coating to the cross-laminated timber and glulam at EDGE London Bridge — a 28-storey office tower on St Thomas Street, Southwark, and the first UK project by developer EDGE.

The building is a hybrid structure. A post-tensioned concrete frame carries the western portion, while to the east a steel-framed zone on a regular six-metre grid uses steel columns and beams to support CLT floors. A four-storey timber podium below combines glulam beams with CLT floors. Severfield delivered both the steel and the timber packages, erecting around 1,300 tonnes of steelwork including roughly 23 tonnes of reused sections.

The timber is left exposed as a finished surface, so the coating is what the occupant sees. It had to achieve the required fire performance across both the CLT panels and the glulam members while keeping the grain and character of the timber visible — there is nowhere to conceal a poor finish. The work was carried out at height on a live, tightly sequenced site immediately alongside London Bridge Station, with film thicknesses recorded against each area and issued as part of the handover documentation.

The tower is targeting BREEAM Outstanding and WELL Platinum, and is intended to be one of the most sustainable office buildings in London.