October 27, 2021
One of our Operating Partners, Wrenbridge, are consulting on turning Lilly House, off Priestley Road in Rooksdown, into a new net carbon zero warehouse.
The project, if approved by planners, will see a £50 million investment in Basingstoke and Deane and 250-500 new jobs created, with the “vast majority” going to local people.
American pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly, synonymous with Basingstoke, are vacating their former home on Priestly Road for new offices in Basing View, funded partly by the borough council.
Now Wrenbridge are planning to transform the Lilly House site into a 200,000 square foot “logistical development” with associated offices.
The future occupier of the site has not yet been announced, but Wrenbridge’s chief executive Ben Coles told The Gazette they were in discussions with two “household names”.
He said in an exclusive interview with this newspaper: “It will be as sustainable a warehouse as you can get.
“We don’t just do what we need to do to get planning [permission]. We’ll future proof the whole thing, so if someone comes along in five years time and want 100 per cent electric cars, we’ll have all of the infrastructure to allow the end user to do that.
“We are future proofing it as well as ticking all of the boxes, but in addition making it a nice place to work.
“We won’t build a building that isn’t carbon net zero. A lot of people got on the sustainability bandwagon a year or so ago, we were on it years before that.
“It is not something we have to do, it is something we want to do.”
Meanwhile, spokesperson Krystian Groom said that the warehouse could be delivered by the end of 2022.
“Wrenbridge are bringing this forward speculatively, we don’t have an operator signed up yet.
“That isn’t to say there isn’t substantial market demand for it, it’s that we can’t at this point say who the operator is going to be.
“We are looking at between 250 and 500 jobs, and that is new jobs that don’t exist in the borough yet.
Originally published by The Basingstoke Gazette in October 2021.