Described as both Sheffield’s Chinatown and its very own ‘Times Square’, New Era Square in Sheffield is a £66M development scheme to construct 5 blocks containing luxury student accomodation, a 21-storey tower, a Chinese ‘cash-and-carry’ supermarket, other restaurants, cafés and retail units, office and residential accommodation, a medical centre and a ‘China-UK Business Incubator’, all set around a brand-new public square. The ‘Business Incubator’ is designed to help advance local businesses, invest in the city, and promote China-UK trade. The final development will include partnerships with Sheffield Hallam University. Phase 1 was completed in 2018, with the completion of the £27M Phase 2 scheduled for late 2019, which is expected to provide 400 jobs.
Jerry Cheung, Managing Director of New Era Development, said: “Building New Era Square in the heart of Sheffield has been an amazing journey and we’re thrilled … to complete our vision of delivering fantastic student accommodation for a vibrant and thriving community. Phase 2 of the development will include a Chinese Incubator Unit which is expected to provide significant inward investment from China.” New Era Square, nicknamed ‘Sheffield’s Chinatown’, has been designed to integrate the Chinese community with the rest of Sheffield, rather than keeping it separate.
During the construction of Phase 1, 1,640 workers were involved onsite, with an average of 135 workers onsite every day, providing 300,000 man-hours of work over the course of the first phase of development. Approval for phase 2 was granted in January 2018, and excavation and foundation works began shortly afterwards. CMF was appointed to manufacture the MetFloor steel decking and the CSC steel shear studs for use in the construction of the 2 southern blocks in New Era Square.
Studwelders installation teams received deliveries of the cold-formed steel products between August 2018 and January 2019, and immediately began installation. The project involved over 6000 square metres of traditional dovetail re-entrant MetFloor 55 and approximately 11,000 square metres of long-span trapezoidal MetFloor 60 steel decking, as well as thousands of CSC composite shear connectors, designed by CFD group to be the perfect accompaniment to the MetFloor range, and designed for through-deck welding to securely fasten the profiled steel decking to the steel framework. Studwelders also installed FASET-compliant safety netting across the site. Once installed and welded down, the metal decking was ready for concreting, to create a lightweight composite flooring system. This is a service that Studwelders can provide themselves, as they are members of the Concrete Society, adhere to SCI P300 guidelines, and have dedicated concreting teams across the length and breadth of the country, to minimise the time delays and environmental impact associated with having a single, centralised team making longer commutes. Studwelders provides a composite floor decking ‘one-stop shop’, able to handle every phase of a composite flooring project, from the fully integrated slab designing process, carried out by inhouse designing teams, to manufacturing the steel products, to safely installing everything onsite. This fully integrated process, from start to finish, can help to minimise time delays and cost overruns. Studwelders completed their contract in Sheffield in early 2019, ready for the final stages of construction to proceed ahead of completion in late 2019.
New Era Development has further plans for investment and development projects across the Sheffield region once their flagship maiden project (and now headquarters), New Era Square is complete. CFD Group is looking forward to potential partnerships with New Era Development in other dynamic and innovative projects in future.
