Sanderson Associates to work on largest Marks and Spencer store scheme outside London
Sanderson Associates, the award-wining West Yorkshire consulting engineers, have been appointed by Simons Developments Ltd to work on the largest Marks & Spencer store outside London.
The Huddersfield-based company will be designing and project managing all the off-site highway works at the new Marks & Spencer store at Cheshire Oaks in Ellesmere Port, near Chester.
The flagship store will be Marks & Spencer’s largest for 10 years and their biggest development in the UK outside London. The planned store will create a significant number of new jobs for the area.
The developer, Simons, is working on detailed designs for the £45 million store to create a sustainable development and to significantly reduce the amount of energy used compared to a similar sized M&S store.
It is expected that the store will stock the entire range of M&S goods and provide significant regeneration, socio-economic and employment benefits as well as having a greatly reduced carbon footprint.
Alison France, the managing director of Sanderson Associates, commented: “This is a tremendous start to the New Year for us. Cheshire Oaks is a major development and we look forward to delivering a complex project on time and within budget. Neither will we compromise on quality.
“The retail sector has taken a hammering during this recession, but Marks & Spencer has proved remarkably resilient. The company’s £45 million investment in the Ellesmere Port store is evidence that it has the confidence to expand in these difficult times,” she said.
She added: “It is important that other successful firms share this confidence and follow M&S’s lead. If confidence spreads, then we can emerge from this debilitating recession.”
Sanderson Associates has identified ten separate highway projects that will need to be designed and constructed before the new store can open.
Work is due to start on site at Cheshire Oaks early in 2010 with the store expected to open in 2012.