Last phase of Britannia Project on hold as council contractor enters administration
The final stage of a major regeneration project in Hackney has stalled after the lead contractor fell into administration following a High Court ruling.
On Tuesday 16 June, Hackney Council announced that construction on Shoreditch Parkside, the final phase of the £154m Britannia Project, has paused as Ardmore Construction faces potential insolvency.
The company appointed administrators on Thursday 11 June after the High Court found multiple companies within the Ardmore Group liable for historic claims around cladding safety.
The local authority confirmed that though the court ruling was unrelated to the Britannia Project, the firm’s financial collapse has left the latest development in limbo. In a statement, the council said it was “working on contingency plans to get the new homes completed as soon as possible in the event of any insolvency”.
“We appreciate that this is a difficult time for all stakeholders in the project, and are committed to completing the development as soon as possible, including the 51 social rent homes,” the council added.
The Shoreditch Parkside development is slated to deliver four new buildings containing 371 homes – 290 for outright sale, 51 for social rent and 30 for shared ownership. Hackney Council confirmed to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) that none of these properties have yet been built and no social tenancies have been allocated so far.
The council said: “We are making contact with residents who are due to move into the social rented homes in the development, and those who had expressed interest in the homes for private sale, to explain the delay.”
The halted development comes months after the council’s plan for up to 90 new homes at Lincoln Court Estate was paused amid spiralling construction costs. The council had already spent £2.1m preparing for the development.
Including Britannia Place, Ardmore has 10 major construction sites in the capital, according to Construction Enquirer. These include the £500m Tribeca project in King’s Cross, the Hammersmith Civic Campus and Hackney Yards in Hackney Wick.
On Tuesday16 June, a spokesperson for Hammersmith and Fulham Council told the LDRS the campus project would be “business as usual” despite Ardmore’s situation. They added: “We have long been aware of Ardmore Construction Group Ltd’s circumstances and have prepared accordingly.”
Hackney Council told the LDRS it had been monitoring Ardmore’s position since April 2026, after the High Court ruled against the firm and “put their future at risk”. Since the news of Ardmore’s collapse last week, administrators have confirmed that roughly 275 Ardmore Group staff across six firms have been laid off.
Commenting on the administration, a spokesperson for Ardmore told Construction Enquirer: “This is a deeply disappointing outcome for the construction group, its employees and its stakeholders.
“Our focus is now on preserving value in the wider group, protecting the continuing businesses where possible, and pursuing the appeal against a judgment which we believe raises important questions for the wider industry.”
The Britannia Project’s earlier phases saw the delivery of a new Britannia Leisure Centre, which opened in 2021, and the City of London Academy Shoreditch Park the same year. These were built by Morgan Sindall Construction. Hackney Council appointed Ardmore to carry out the project’s final phase in 2023.
As of Tuesday 16 June, Ardmore’s security staff continue to be present on site 24 hours a day, and a mobile security unit is also patrolling the site.
It’s not legitimate for anyone, least of all Hackney Council, to blame the High Court for having “put their [Ardmore’s] future at risk”.
Surely Ardmore Construction/its associated companies only suffered that adverse ruling because of their own failures to carry out cladding works safely on other buildings.
Hackney Council would be better advised to examine urgently how it came to appoint Ardmore to finish the Britannia project three years ago, given the powers given by the Building Safety Act 2022 to extend liability to associated companies. It’s not clear when legal proceedings began against Ardmore Construction arising from post-Grenfell investigations but surely the Council should have made careful enquiries before making this appointment. (Some background appears in the discussion of these Building Liability Orders at https://www.pumpcourtchambers.com/crest-nicholson-v-ardmore-2026-ewhc-789-tcc-a-landmark-decision-on-building-liability-orders/ .)
The Labour regime of Phil Glanville and Jon Burke forced through the giant towers of luxury flats in Shoreditch against local residents opposition.
We were called selfish and other awful things.
We, a local group trying to defend the Britannia Leisure centre from demolition had support from experts in planning and development. We warned that this development of the city academy, new Britannia and luxury flats, all underwritten by Council Tax payers was a financial disaster waiting to happen. Well now it’s happened…Ardmore has gone into administration and left the Council with enormous debts and a part constructed site. Whose services will be decimated by this? It will be Hackney residents services.
The Labour Mayor and Labour Cllr’s and senior officers are all largely gone leaving disaster in their wake. The hubris and trumpian determination to gentrify Shoreditch will cause real pain to already poor people. No wonder in a Council where they used to weigh labour votes people chose the Greens
The Labour regime of Mayor Phil Glanville and Jon Burke forced through the giant towers of luxury flats in Shoreditch against local residents opposition.
We were called selfish and other awful things.
We, a local group trying to defend the Britannia Leisure centre from demolition had support from experts in planning and development. We warned that this development of the city academy, new Britannia and luxury flats, all underwritten by Council Tax payers was a financial disaster waiting to happen. Well now it’s happened…Ardmore has gone into administration and left the Council with enormous debts and a part constructed site. Whose services will be decimated by this? It will be Hackney residents services.
The Labour Mayor and Labour Cllr’s and senior officers are all largely gone leaving disaster in their wake. The hubris and trumpian determination to gentrify Shoreditch will cause real pain to already poor people. No wonder in a Council where they used to weigh labour votes people chose the Greens
I had the same thoughts as Diana had and agree with her comment. I think we are only just starting to see the scale and consequences of the range of poor decisions made by self serving Labour Hackney Council.
oh, my gawd…
it’s all come on-top.
run, terry, run…before they find all the blu-tack and sticky tape.
we never intended building that block of flats for social rent anyway, did we…?
so where’s the £154 million, then…?
better ask the gang-of-four:
1. dirty rotten dictator – and disgraced ex-mayor – phil-yer-boots glanville
2. infill glanville’s paedo-pal-in-crime – the convicted ex-councillor tom dewey
3. dodgy ex-councillor guy “finger-in-every-pie” nicholson
4. climate-conman – and lord of the low traffic neighbourhood – exiled councillor jon burke
moi? nuffink to do with me, squire – honest.
the photo for this article is actually an architect’s mock-up of hackney council’s flagship cock-up, and therefore merely comprises an ai enhanced visualization of the britannia project, as if it were already completed…
so why doesn’t mr josef steen – our intrepid and industrious local democracy journalist – get his arse down to shoreditch park to snap labour’s faulty towers as they stand today – in all their unfinished and unexpurgated glory?
ermmm…i ask just out of curiosity, but did the greens ever call-out the construction of this magnificent monument to municipal corruption – or indeed, ever question the decision to award the contract for its creation to confirmed cladding-cowboys ardcore…?
or of course, is it in fact the case that the gentrification-jolly greens were bunged like the rest of the larcenous local establishment?
well, i couldn’t agree more with the shortlist you’ve drawn-up of socially slippery suspects, mr pipe, however if you genuinely wish to locate the current whereabouts of council tax payers’ hard-earned cash, it should be the metropolitan police force which conducts the investigation into the great hoxton high-rise hustle, not hackney council.
ok, never mind the town hall’s neuschwanstein-level folly, we can always get dylan to finish-off its façade.
how long ’til demolition day?
when in preparation for the britannia redevelopment, hackney council perpetrated a full-scale massacre of the many mature trees which once surrounded the former leisure-centre car-park, and bordered shoreditch park itself, we heard not a sausage out of the green party, and nor did the greens care one jot about the blatant corruption involved in the planning process for the britannia project…
yet why is this so?
well, the truth is that the green party harbours no genuine concern for the environment or matters ecological, because its membership of cia-backed establishment-gangsters are in fact fake environmentalists, who simply crave the attainment of political power, at any price, and by any means, in order to wage – in collaboration with ukrainian neo-nazis – never-ending neo-imperialist war against russia, and to reboot – in concert with the neo-colonial eu – a rolling african genocide, which will bring forth the forbidden fruit of copious conflict-minerals for the benefit of our wealth-and-war-addicted western middle-classes.
mein lieber gott, a british green party which promotes russophobic and pro-nuclear policies? that’s a new one on me, i’m afraid…
and as for the neo-liberal hackney labour party and its poodle-packed planning committee, i reckon that every corrupt councillor who voted for the britannia project should be slung straight into prison.
As I have been mentioned by several anonymous posters in the responses to this article, it’s worth noting the following:
1/ Ardmore were appointed as contractors for the final phase of the Britannia project more than two years after I left the council, and five years after I had any meaningful involvement with the project. I literally had nothing to do with their appointment.
2/ The phase of the project for which I had joint responsibility – as Cabinet Member for Leisure Services between 2016 and 2018 – is the multi-award winning Britannia Leisure Centre, which is a vast improvement of the crumbling facility it replaced.
3/ I personally fought incredibly hard to save as many trees as possible at the site – including forcing a redesign to save a full line of trees on Pitfield street, attempting to bring in the largest tree spade in the world, and spading some of the specimens in the old Britannia car park – as well as replacing lost specimens threefold in the park and delivering the largest urban tree planting programme in Britain. Please feel free to FOI this.
4/ The only way to fund the new leisure centre and school – the latter of which was desperately required pre-Covid – was through cross-financing via private, shared ownership, and – crucially – new council housing. Ardmore’s financial circumstances are unrelated to this project and do not invalidate this method of funding new infrastructure.
5/ “Lord of the Low Traffic Neighbourhood” is very complimentary. I shall wear the title with pride. Thank you.
I wonder if Jon Burke is proud of lying about his resignation as a ward councillor to run he said for the Mayoralty of Liverpool (where he hadn’t lived for ten years) when really it was because he was facing 19 complaints about his behaviour as a councillor which he didn’t want made public?
“The Shoreditch Parkside development is slated to deliver four new buildings containing 371 homes – 290 for outright sale, 51 for social rent and 30 for shared ownership. Hackney Council confirmed to the Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) that none of these properties have yet been built and no social tenancies have been allocated so far.”
Given the dire state of actually affordable housing supply in London, how about taking this opportunity to make 290 of the new homes for social rent, 51 for outright sale, and leave the 30 for shared ownership – though maybe that’s not such a good idea, as most people think that is a scam anyway.
Dear Mr Anthony,
I think you’ll find there were 21 complaints about my support for Low Traffic Neighbourhoods – of which I delivered the most in the U.K – not 19.
Far from ‘not wanting them made public’, I wear them as a badge of pride. So much so, in fact, that I’m the only public source of every one them. You can read them all here: https://x.com/jonburkeUK/status/1545096814755545090
Best wishes,
Jon
P.S I hope you finally came to terms with the lane swimming arrangements at London Fields Lido. It’s a great place to cool off at this time of year. Enjoy!
Yet when you said in your resignation statement (Hackney Citizen 4th January 2021) that you, “did not consider yourself a favoured candidate among other Liverpool councillors seeking the role (of Liverpool mayor) ” this was a lie because you were not and never had been a “Liverpool councillor”, do you accept this?
Do you also accept that on twitter in April 2020 you compared Jeremy Corbyn unfavourably to Kier Starmer because he didn’t have a knighthood?
“Lord of the low traffic neighbourhood” you always were a admirer of titles in others you wretched boot black.