The Gate, Furnival Square, Sheffield

Topping out at 64m tall, Furnival Square hosts a brand new £35 million, 445 bedroom, purpose built student accommodation building on a prime site in the heart of Sheffield City Centre, adjacent to the Sheffield Hallam University campus.

Built by McAleer & Rushe and aptly named the ‘The Gate’, the 22 storey building offers modern, quality student accommodation to support Sheffield’s thriving higher education sector. The building is designed to a BREEAM Very Good rating, developed and detailed by TODD Architects using the latest in Revit and BIM technologies.

The specification called for the use of special bricks that gave depth and texture to the external skin. The 22 storey student accommodation tower also had to comply with all current Building Height Regulations for residential use and the construction team was faced with the considerable additional challenge of completing the build during global pandemic restrictions.

Ash & Lacy provided over 4,000m2 of the fully-tested noncombustible, mechanically-fixed NaturAL-X brick cladding system, suitable for residential buildings above 18m tall. The system is also CWCT A1-rated and BBA certified (20/5773). Brick choice was SD102 from the Simplicity range.

This lightweight system offers fast and simple installation and enabled a large amount of labor to be completed offsite, improving time efficiencies on site and facilitating just in time delivery.

Over 50,000 cut and bonded corner bricks were manufactured at our in house facility, creating the deep castellating reveals that sweep across the building elevations. Soffit bricks were designed and manufactured to return underneath window heads, providing a realistic genuine brick aesthetic at key interfaces, achieving the original design intent.