GRAHAM has completed the restoration of the Victorian Osney Power Station in Oxford as the £60m (€70.2m) Global Leadership Centre for Saïd Business School, a delivery that shows the engineering demands of keeping heritage façades while rebuilding a constrained riverside site behind them.

GRAHAM, headquartered in Hillsborough, County Down, is a privately owned construction and investment group operating across the UK and Ireland.

Saïd Business School, the University of Oxford’s business and management school, commissioned the centre as its dedicated home for executive leadership education, supported by a £15m (€17.6m) gift from naming founder Wafic Saïd.

Architects John McAslan + Partners designed the scheme.

GRAHAM retained the original brick façades on three sides and rebuilt the structure behind them, using a sheet-piled cofferdam beside the Thames and reusing 430 of 448 cubic metres of excavated concrete in the piling mat.

GRAHAM Regional Director Pat O’Hare said the project showed the breadth of the firm’s expertise on a constrained Thames-side site, while Louise Croft, managing director of executive education at Saïd Business School, said the building has been reimagined as a place for learning and reflection.

The project is reported at £60m (€70.2m), including a £15m (€17.6m) donation.

Retaining façades while rebuilding behind them calls for sequencing that ordinary refurbishment does not, and the timeline shows the scale of the task: the scheme started on site in September 2021 and completed in August 2026.

The completed centre turns the former turbine hall into a triple-height convening space and adds 120 bedrooms across three new floors concealed within the original sheds.

The £60m (€70.2m) scheme was first mooted in 2015 and its opening was delayed more than once, with the site, a Local Heritage Asset that opened in 1892 and closed in 1968, carrying constraints that new-build education projects rarely face.

For the sector, heritage conversions for education clients show that long-life buildings can be reused rather than replaced, and contractors that can pair conservation skills with modern engineering, including material reuse on site, are better placed for this work.

Source: Belfast News Letter / Infrastructure Now / Cherwell