IN Brief:
- Seth Real Estate has secured planning approval to convert around 85,000 sq ft of former HMRC offices into 95 apartments.
- The revised project provides 64 one-bedroom and 31 two-bedroom homes after an earlier 106-unit proposal failed on daylight grounds.
- The 10-storey conversion must now pass through the Building Safety Regulator’s Gateway 2 process before relevant building work starts.
Seth Real Estate has secured planning approval for a revised conversion of Imperial Court in Liverpool, allowing the 95-apartment project to move towards building-control approval through the Building Safety Regulator.
The 10-storey former HMRC office building sits within the Castle Street conservation area and contains around 85,000 sq ft of vacant accommodation. NC Architecture and Broadgrove Planning & Development are working with Seth on the scheme, which will provide 64 one-bedroom and 31 two-bedroom apartments.
The approval follows an earlier proposal to convert the building into 106 homes under permitted development rights. Liverpool City Council rejected that scheme in May after daylight concerns, prompting the project team to reduce the unit count and return with a revised approach.
The approved design includes new windows and an updated cladding treatment, while ground-floor accommodation could support office, commercial or restaurant uses. Resident facilities are planned to include a gym of more than 1,000 sq ft, co-working space, music and recording studios, a yoga room and a games room.
Planning approval removes one obstacle, but it does not authorise construction. Because the completed building will fall within the higher-risk building regime, the development team is preparing a Gateway 2 building-control application to the Building Safety Regulator, which must approve relevant work before it begins.
That requirement creates a clearer division between planning design and construction information than applied to many earlier office-to-residential conversions. Planning establishes whether the development is acceptable in land-use and design terms, while Gateway 2 requires much greater evidence around building regulations compliance, design coordination and the management of safety-critical information.
At Imperial Court, the change from offices to 95 homes will place particular emphasis on compartmentation, means of escape, fire and smoke systems, façade interfaces and the coordination of mechanical and electrical services. Existing structures and service routes were designed around a different occupancy pattern, so the conversion depends on understanding what can be retained and what needs upgrading.
The façade changes extend beyond appearance. New windows and revised cladding have to work with thermal performance, ventilation, weather tightness, fire performance and the building’s conservation-area setting. Altering one part of an existing envelope can expose deficiencies elsewhere if retained materials, cavities and interfaces are not understood before detailed design is fixed.
Daylight has already reshaped the project. The earlier 106-home proposal failed after concerns that a substantial proportion of rooms would not receive sufficient natural light. Reducing the number of apartments changes the development economics, but it can also produce more workable layouts where an office floorplate was never designed around residential room depths.
Structural reuse can reduce the amount of new material required compared with demolition and replacement, but conversion is not automatically the simpler construction route. Surveys may reveal obsolete services, undocumented alterations, asbestos, inadequate fire stopping or structural openings that complicate the proposed residential plan.
Those existing conditions then have to be reconciled with modern acoustic, thermal, accessibility and building safety requirements. The quality of the survey information and the extent to which the design team can resolve those issues before work starts will influence both the Gateway 2 application and the amount of change encountered during construction.
The professional team also includes transport planner Cora, Adapt Heritage and daylight specialist Proximity, reflecting the range of constraints around a city-centre conversion. Heritage setting, servicing, residential amenity, daylight, building fabric and regulatory compliance all have to be addressed within the footprint of an existing structure.
Imperial Court became available after HMRC consolidated its Liverpool operations into India Buildings. The ground-floor commercial component is intended to retain some non-residential activity, while the upper floors move the building towards a predominantly residential use within the business district.
The revised scheme has now cleared the planning issue that stopped its predecessor, but Gateway 2 becomes the next programme gate. Seth and its consultants must convert an approved planning concept into sufficiently coordinated building-control information for the regulator to accept before work starts. On a 10-storey conversion, the regulatory sequence is part of the construction programme rather than an administrative step beside it.
