Arundel Square

Arundel Square in Islington, N7, was a 146-home scheme valued at around 30 million pounds and finished in November 2009, its completion delivered by United House, a BREE legacy company. The project completed the fourth side of a Victorian square that had stood unfinished for around 150 years, restoring the original townscape vision.

Designed by Pollard Thomas Edwards, the development closed the square while creating a substantial number of new homes in a tightly constrained inner-London setting.

The defining engineering challenge of Arundel Square was that the new homes were built on a deck spanning a working railway line. Constructing the rail deck and the apartments above it required careful coordination to deliver the scheme without disrupting rail operations below.

The result was a row of new homes, including penthouse flats, that appeared to complete the historic square naturally while in fact resting on a complex piece of structural engineering over the tracks.

Coordinating with the railway authorities and sequencing the deck construction were central to keeping the line running while the homes took shape above. The engineering effort was largely hidden in the finished scheme, which reads as a natural continuation of the surrounding terraces rather than a structure built over infrastructure.

Arundel Square was named Housing Project of the Year at the Building Awards 2011 and won at the Housing Design Awards, recognition of both its architectural achievement and the ingenuity required to build it. The scheme demonstrated how a long-standing gap in the urban fabric could be filled with sensitivity and ambition.

For BREE Construction, the project remains a standout example of its legacy work resolving difficult London sites through engineering skill and design quality.

The scheme also added a meaningful number of affordable and private homes to Islington's housing supply, doing so in a way that strengthened rather than disrupted the historic character of the area.