IN Brief:
- Willmott Dixon has secured the £92m College of North West London campus at Wembley Park.
- The 14,200 sq m building will include vocational workshops, laboratories, teaching rooms, and support facilities.
- The project forms part of wider Wembley regeneration linked to new homes, skills provision, and community infrastructure.
Willmott Dixon has secured a £92m contract to build a new campus for the College of North West London at Wembley Park, creating an eight-storey education and skills hub on Olympic Way.
The project will see a long-disused building close to Wembley Stadium demolished and replaced with a 14,200 sq m campus for United Colleges Group. The scheme was secured through the Southern Construction Framework and forms part of Brent Council’s wider plan to establish an education quarter in Wembley.
The new building will be arranged around three stacked blocks, with vocational workshops on the lower floors, a central student hub opening onto a landscaped deck, and teaching spaces above. A full-height atrium will run through the building, bringing daylight into the centre of the campus and linking all floors.
Facilities will include bricklaying and joinery workshops, hairdressing salons, science laboratories, teaching rooms, learning support space, and social areas. Expanded provision will also be included for learners with learning disabilities or difficulties and profound and multiple learning difficulties.
The college has said the campus will support training in construction, engineering, digital, and green skills, alongside plans for a hospitality academy. Willmott Dixon is targeting BREEAM Excellent, with completion due in spring 2029.
The project is tied to a wider regeneration structure involving The Hill Group and Pinnacle Investments. Associated redevelopment of the college’s existing Wembley and Willesden sites is expected to help deliver more than 1,900 homes, new community infrastructure, green spaces, and employment opportunities across Brent. The scheme has been developed with support from Brent Council, the Department for Education, and the Greater London Authority.
The campus uses education estate renewal as part of a wider regeneration programme. Its location on Olympic Way gives the building unusual public visibility for a further education facility, placing technical education in one of London’s most recognisable urban corridors. Construction will take place in a high-footfall environment shaped by major event-day movements, transport flows, and neighbouring development activity.
The scheme brings together several recurring pressures in the education sector: delivery on a constrained urban site, sustainable design targets, specialist vocational fit-out, and the need to build facilities that can adapt to shifting labour-market requirements. Workshops for construction and engineering skills carry different servicing, robustness, acoustic, safety, and spatial requirements from standard classroom space, while science laboratories and supported learning areas add further layers of design coordination.
The project also lands against a persistent construction skills gap. Further education colleges are being asked to support local pipelines into construction, engineering, digital infrastructure, retrofit, and low-carbon building services. A campus designed around those sectors can strengthen local labour routes, particularly where regeneration programmes are expected to connect physical development with employment opportunities.
Willmott Dixon’s appointment adds to its education portfolio, which includes recent further and higher education schemes for Queen Mary University of London, the University of Staffordshire, and Bridgend College. At Wembley, the contractor will deliver a building sitting at the junction of education, regeneration, housing growth, and technical skills policy, a combination that is becoming more common as public-sector clients seek greater value from capital investment.
