Mitsui Fudosan breaks ground on its biggest UK project yet, a £1.1bn British Library redevelopment

Mitsui Fudosan said its UK subsidiary, Mitsui Fudosan (UK) Ltd., started construction on September 17 on a redevelopment of the British Library's Euston Road site in London, with a ceremonial groundbreaking held September 21, according to a release dated September 29. The company is calling the scheme the "(tentatively named) British Library Redevelopment Project."

The site, near King's Cross and St Pancras stations, covers roughly 122,000 sq ft of land and will carry about 1.04 million sq ft of total floor area on completion, the company said. Around 100,000 sq ft of that will be new public space for the library itself — additional exhibition galleries, a learning centre and event space — with roughly 600,000 sq ft of office, lab-and-office and commercial space above it, according to Mitsui Fudosan. The project is due for completion in 2032, developed with Stanhope PLC as development manager, RSHP as architect and Mace Construct managing construction.

London Mayor Sadiq Khan, quoted in Mitsui Fudosan's own release, put the investment in the project at £1.1 billion.

Mitsui Fudosan is the developer floortok tracks for Tokyo's tallest towers and biggest mixed-use openings — Otemachi, Nihonbashi, the Tokyo Midtown projects — so a scheme this size, wrapped around a public institution as prominent as the British Library, says more about the company's ambitions than about its home market. Betting on office and lab-office space in central London, at a scale that rivals its largest domestic projects, signals that Mitsui Fudosan sees its next phase of growth abroad as much as in a Tokyo market where prime sites are scarce and its own supply pipeline is maturing.