Our mantra at TBC.London is ‘Do Good, Feel Good, Be Good’. We want to ensure that we create a sustainable building in order to do our part to address the climate crisis. It should also empower healthy lifestyle decisions including boosting physical and mental wellbeing. And it must enrich and strengthen the surrounding communities and neighbourhoods.

To date, a big part of how we’ve worked to achieve this has been through our social value activity which has seen training, skill-building, and education at the heart of every process as we design and retrofit the building.

Since TBC.London started on site in September 2022, we have completed two cohorts of The Building Lives Training Academy – a fully-funded pre-employment programme providing young people with the skills, qualifications, and work experience to progress into a career in construction. The programme is run over several weeks and includes a Level 1 Employability Skills Award. Through these efforts, our project teams commit to providing industry awareness sessions, careers guidance, employability skills, networking with our supply chain partners on site, and even guaranteeing interviews.

We also participated in CITB (Construction Industry Training Board) and their Open Doors Week, an annual opportunity for young people to go behind the scenes of construction projects. We gave tours around the TBC.London site to students studying Engineering and Construction courses at universities in and around London. CITB is an excellent initiative that focuses on getting young people, and especially young women, into careers in construction.

Part of ‘Doing Good’ means that we have made sustainable choices at every stage of the design and construction process. This makes TBC.London a perfect case study for students at the AA School of Architecture. They have now completed several site visits to watch construction progress and learn first hand the secrets of a sustainable deep retrofit. The students have been particularly interested in the 100-year old steel that we salvaged from the former House of Fraser on Oxford Street and installed at TBC.London.

We have also been hosting a Level 3 Engineering T-Level student from Westminster Kingsway College, who is completing work experience with us on site.

These are just a few examples of ‘good’ happening at TBC.London, which enable our building to positively impact the communities around our site, and particularly the young people entering the built environment sector.

It’s exciting to see the good that we can bring even before the building is occupied. Once we re-open the doors next summer, our 3,500 sq ft Urban Village Hall will become a focal point for cultural, educational and vocational activities for the Southwark community, our teams will be partnering with local social enterprises to supply goods and services at the building, and other creative ideas are well under way. Watch this space!

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