Plans are in for One Founders Place, a £70m office building in Newcastle’s Stephenson Quarter, and the numbers behind it are the most interesting part. As Place North East reported, developer Igloo submitted the application this month in partnership with the council.
The building
185,000 sq ft across 12 storeys, designed by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, targeting BREEAM Excellent and the WELL Building Standard. All-electric heating, high-efficiency systems, rooftop terraces and ground floor dining. A tree-lined public square, Founders Square, improves pedestrian and cycle connections through the quarter.
The all-electric specification is not a detail. Corporate occupiers with net zero commitments increasingly cannot take space in gas-heated buildings, and a lot of the North’s existing office stock is exactly that. Buildings like this one are being built for a tenant requirement that barely existed a decade ago.
The jobs maths
Igloo’s figures: around 302 full-time equivalent construction jobs a year over two years, 456 supply chain jobs, roughly 1,300 people working in the finished building, 389 jobs supported locally, and around £80m of GVA a year.
Treat developer economic impact figures with the scepticism they deserve, because they are produced to support a planning application. But the headline that matters is simpler and harder to inflate: 1,300 desks in a city centre building, on a site currently producing nothing.
The quarter is actually being delivered
This is the third phase, not a first announcement, which is the strongest thing about it. Phase one, The Pattern Shop, completed in 2024 and is occupied by Atom Bank. Phase two, Orchard Yard, with 79 homes, was submitted in July 2026. A masterplan where earlier phases are finished and let is a very different proposition to one that exists only as a brochure.
Joe Broadley, development director at Igloo, framed it as “creating a destination that reflects Newcastle’s rich industrial heritage while providing sustainable workspaces”. Stephenson Quarter sits on the land around Robert Stephenson’s locomotive works, so the heritage line is more literal than usual.
The risk worth naming
185,000 sq ft is a lot of office space to let in Newcastle, in a market where hybrid working has permanently reduced the amount of desk space companies take. The counter-argument is that occupiers have concentrated demand into the best buildings, and there is very little genuinely top-grade, low-carbon space available in the city.
That is the bet: not that Newcastle needs more offices in total, but that it needs better ones, and that firms will consolidate out of tired stock to get them. On the evidence of Atom Bank taking The Pattern Shop, it is a reasonable bet. It is still a bet.
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