Contract award
Middlesbrough turns a closed library into a services hub
By Staff Writer | 30-08-2026
Middlesbrough Council has let the conversion of the former Berwick Hills Library to Tom Willoughby Limited at 985,998.98 pounds excluding value added tax, or 1,183,198.77 pounds including it. The contract details notice, identifier 082221-2026, was published on the United Kingdom tender service at 14:21 on 28 August 2026. The contract was signed on 3 August 2026.
The scope is a strip out and full refurbishment of an existing unit previously used as a local library, adapted to provide a new locality hub for joint council services. It includes all new finishes, a new mechanical and electrical installation, and associated external works.
The programme runs from 3 August 2026 to 15 December 2026, which is nineteen weeks for a full strip out and refit of an occupied civic building type.
A strip out, not a fit out
The phrase in the notice is strip and full refurbishment, with all new finishes and a new mechanical and electrical installation. That is a heavier scope than the word conversion usually carries. Taking the M and E out of a 1960s or 1970s branch library and replacing it wholesale is the item that governs the programme, not the finishes, because the new services have to be designed around whatever structure and floor to ceiling height the existing shell offers.
Associated external works are named separately. On a building being changed from a single use library to a multi service hub, those normally cover access, entrance arrangements and the hard landscaping that follows from moving the front door or widening it. They are also the works that open the ground on a site of that age, which is where unrecorded services and old foundations turn up.
Below threshold, limited competition
The procurement was run as a below threshold limited competition under the Procurement Act 2023, with the tender reference GAP101/2026. At just under a million pounds excluding tax, that route is open to the council, and the notice does not record how many firms were invited or how many bid.
Tom Willoughby Limited is registered at company number 00703979, at Construction House in North Yorkshire, and is recorded on the notice as a small or medium sized enterprise. The requirement is classified as construction work and the delivery region is recorded as South Teesside. The award and the contract are both recorded as active.
The pattern behind the project
The notice describes the scheme as part of the council's east locality provision, and names the end use as a locality hub for joint council services. Local authorities across the north east have been consolidating separately staffed front line services into single buildings for several years, and a closed branch library is a common candidate: it is already council owned, already in a residential catchment, and already built for public access.
For contractors, the point of interest is the delivery model rather than the value. Nineteen weeks to strip, re-service and refit a public building, with the completion date fixed at 15 December, leaves no float for a service diversion or an asbestos finding to be absorbed inside the programme. The contract period as published ends nine days before Christmas, and the council has published no extension option against it.
The buyer's address on the notice is PO Box 500, Middlesbrough. The signing date of 3 August 2026 sits twenty five days before publication, so work will have been under way for some weeks before the notice appeared.