Contract award
Multiplex confirmed as main contractor for 99 City Road
By Staff Writer | 12 August 2026
Endurance Land has confirmed Multiplex as main contractor for 99 City Road, a 36 storey commercial tower on the northern edge of the City of London, with main works starting within weeks.
The appointment follows a period during which Multiplex worked on the scheme under a pre-construction services agreement. Signing the build contract converts that early involvement into the main works obligation, and construction is due to begin within weeks.
The tower will deliver approximately 475,000 square feet, or about 44,100 square metres, of commercial space. Practical completion is targeted for 2030. The site sits at the intersection of Old Street and the City, in EC1.
No contract value has been published. The figure circulating in the market is a data provider's valuation of the development, which is not the same thing as the sum the parties have agreed, and it is not reported here as one.
What a pre-construction agreement settles, and what it does not
A pre-construction services agreement puts the contractor into the design process before the building contract exists. The contractor prices, programmes and buildability-checks the design while the developer retains the freedom to appoint someone else. For the contractor it is paid preparatory work with no guarantee of the job; for the developer it is a way of testing the price and the programme before committing.
The commercial consequence is that a great deal of the information a dispute would later turn on has already been generated by the time the building contract is signed. Buildability comments, programme assumptions, provisional allowances and design queries all exist in writing, produced by the party that will go on to carry the construction risk. Where the pre-construction work is properly recorded, it narrows the room for later argument about what the contractor knew and when. Where it is not, it does the opposite.
Endurance Land and Multiplex have worked together before, at Regent Quarter, which is the second point of substance in the appointment. A repeat appointment carries assumptions about working methods, reporting and tolerance for change that are rarely written into the contract but shape how the job runs.
Where the programme risk sits
A 2030 completion against a start within weeks gives roughly four years for a 36 storey building in central London. That is not a compressed programme by the standards of the sector, but the location is the constraint rather than the height. A site at the junction of Old Street and the City is bounded by highway authority consents, restricted delivery windows and neighbouring occupiers, and those govern crane time and logistics more tightly than the structure itself does.
The design team is named: Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates as architect, AKT II on structures, Arup on mechanical and electrical services and on sustainability, Arcadis on cost and FMDC on the facade. A separate facade consultant on a tower of this size is worth noting for practitioners, because facade procurement and performance testing sit on the critical path more often than any other package, and a specialist appointment early is the ordinary response to that.
For occupiers the scheme is aimed at technology and innovation led tenants, which in practice means heavier power and cooling provision than a conventional office of the same floor area. That specification tends to be fixed late, after tenant discussions, and late change to services distribution in a completed frame is one of the more expensive things a commercial development can do to itself.