About the Project

Creed Court, St Paul’s London

Construction of 150-bedroom hotel, completed in 209 weeks. 

On his second job for the client and second as a CIOB finalist, Paul Murray showed that small innovations can be just as empowering as big ones.

Not that big innovations were absent on this scheme to demolish a former office building and then excavate a double basement on a tightly constrained site near St Paul’s Cathedral. Paul devised an alternative method of organising the kentledge blocks supporting the grade II-listed facade retention so as to prevent them encroaching on the excavation. 

By changing the roof mansards and plant enclosure to steel, he brought forward the installation of the new-build modular facade by four weeks. And by championing the factory installation of window units for that precast facade, he vastly improved the quality and speed of installation, and reduced the external scaffolding, allowing internal fit-out to start six weeks ahead of target. 

Those are major innovations. Yet the small ones were just as valuable. Paul’s introduction of a factory-installed aluminium spigot connection for the windows greatly assisted in installing the air conditioning. And his development of an elongated scaffold tie for between the 20mm joints of the precast panels eliminated the tying of scaffold (required for installing the zinc facade of the top storeys, which had a 67-degree pitch and limited set-back) into the bedrooms or the new-build facade.