Millwrights Place and Coopers Court residential scheme

Our team in the South West delivered a £63m residential scheme at Finzels Reach in Bristol on behalf of property developer Cubex.

The project involved 297 apartments across two buildings on the former site of the Avon Fire and Rescue headquarters. The largest is Millwrights Place, which will provide 231 private rental apartments in a 14 storey building for Grainger, while adjacent to this is Coopers Court, a 10 storey building providing 66 apartments – 18 shared ownership and 48 affordable.

Both schemes contain a mixture of 1 and 2 bedroom homes, as well courtyard bike stores, roof terraces, a brown roof and undercroft parking.

Finzels Reach

This is our latest project in the Finzels Reach area of Bristol. Previous projects included the £33m Halo office situated nearby, which followed completion of the 95,000 square foot Aurora office in 2018, the city’s first BREEAM outstanding office scheme.

Like Halo, both of these buildings are connected to the city’s district heating network which draws heat from a heat bore in the centre of the city. They were constructed using a concrete frame structure and clad with brick slips, Euroclad Vieo, and Sinusoidal metal cladding.

Gold medal at CMYA awards

Our project director Dave John won a gold medal at the 2025 CIOB Construction Manager awards for his expertise. This is what the judges said:

Covering everything from sample apartments to fire-stopping details and envelope sections, his early benchmark apartment was described as ‘insanely good’ by the scheme funder, and the standard was maintained through to completion. Meanwhile the local authority’s building control inspectors have recognised the project as an exemplar as a result of David’s absolute attention to detail on fire safety compliance.

The problematic logistics on a city centre site with no storage space also included not blocking the route of fire engines at a neighbouring fire station. David’s response was to rent an off-site materials storage yard and bring in a logistics manager. After organising a lessons-learned workshop from a previous project, he created a more robust and cost-effective building by prefabricating the balconies and bolting them on.

Delay was a dirty word. When serious hold-ups to an adjacent development prevented him deploying a 60-ton piling rig to operate from an upper ground floor, David had a propping system designed and installed to cut short the setback. And when events beyond his control postponed the connection to the district heat network by months, he devised a solution for progressing the structural frame and accommodating the network installation later on.

What our local MD said

Neal Stephens MD of Willmott Dixon’s Wales and West region said:

“As well as providing much needed high-quality housing for the people of Bristol, we used our specialist local supply chain to ensure the project acted as a stimulus to the local economy.”