Planning permission has been granted for a hotel project involving two towers to be built on the Albert Embankment in London.
Designed by Hopkins Architects and developed by Ocubis on behalf of Hotchkiss, the site is located in Lambeth close to Lambeth Palace and Lambeth Bridge, to the north of the Nine Elms development.
The hotel will have towers of 26 and 29 storeys respectively, linked by a five-storey platform. An operator for the hotel has not yet been named, but it will have nearly 900 rooms, compared with the 660 proposed for a previous, abandoned, scheme for the site. The scheme gained unanimous approval from planners at Lambeth Council.
Hotchkiss already owns the plot, which presently houses a petrol station that will be demolished and a four-storey Victorian warehouse that will be redeveloped as office space.
Builders’ merchants in London will be keen to get orders for the construction of the scheme, which will feature residential rooms on all but the top floors of each tower, which will be set aside for plant equipment.
Speaking to Architects’ Journal about the scheme, Hopkins principal Jim Greaves said: “What was needed for this constrained but highly visible site, viewable from the World Heritage Site of Westminster and several Thames bridges, was a calm and dignified solution.”
The towers will add to the growing number of skyscrapers clustering along the South Bank of the Thames, most of which are recent developments as part of the Nine Elms project.
A total of 42 separate construction projects have taken place in the area, with the new cluster of tall buildings adding to schemes such as the extension of the Northern line with two new Tube stations and the redevelopment of Battersea Power Station.
The tallest of these skyscrapers is One Nine Elms, at 200m (654 ft). It was completed in 2019.