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Search the Public Notice PortalWork has started on a new student accommodation complex at Hackney Wick in a converted old piano works which closed down 80 years ago that made instruments for kings and the great composes down the ages.
Contractors have been appointed by Firethorn real estates for 204 bedsits with co-working study spaces, common rooms and a gym, as well as a low-cost workspace for the creative industry.
A £55 million “student city” is planned on the site of the historic Broadwood piano factory at Old Ford, on the Lea riverbank.
The builders, HG Construction, aim to get it finished for the 2027-28 academic year, while preserving its ancient brick chimney and boiler house.
“We know the area well and value its rich heritage,” HG’s chief executive Adam Quinn said. “Our ethos is preserving historical elements and maximising social value during the construction.”
The development is part of a cosmopolitan neighbourhood aimed at serving four universities within a two-mile radius such as Queen Mary at Mile End, University of East London at Stratford and Loughborough Uni’s London postgraduate campus and UCL both in the Olympic Park.
The idea was first unveiled in 2021 by Southern Grove developers but was not completed. It is now in progress under developer Firethorn and follows another student bedsit scheme that went ahead four years ago.
The world famous Broardwood piano makers, the oldest surviving manufacturers in the world, were established in the 1740s but closed their Hackney Wick factory in 1950.
John Broadwood & Sons have the Royal Warrant as piano makers for instruments used by great masters down the ages such as Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Chopin and Liszt. A Broadwood piano made at Hackney Wick also went on Captain Scott’s Antarctic expedition in 1910 and was actually played on the ice.
The factory opened in 1902 after the company moved from Westminster and continued making pianos before diversifying briefly during the First World War to assemble wooden biplanes that were held together with piano wire!
Piano-making resumed in the 1920s until the Second World War when production switched to gramophones for a while, before the company moved to Hendon in 1950.
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