Highgate East

Every job brings with it a unique set of challenges.

For this, they were all around logistics – especially given the location.

Highgate East is a new, £70m purpose-built NHS mental health inpatient facility at  Whittington Hospital, right in the heart of London.

Constructed to replace the ageing facilities at St Pancras Hospital, it provides 78 single ensuite rooms to support the recovery of service users.

However, working on such a huge project in Central London forced us to get creative – and adapt.

The products

• Humber windows to bedroom
• AA100 curtain walling
• Rooflights
• Hamble secure doors and main entrance auto doors.
• 160+ Healthcare windows
• 60+ Curtain wall screens

The challenges

Trying to install 160 healthcare windows isn’t easy. Doing it in the middle of a congested capital city – on an incredibly tight site –  was always going to take some out-of-the-box thinking.

So that’s what happened, with the decision made to instead install them off-site, over 150 miles away in Stoke – by fitting them into precast concrete.

The process made installation far easier and from a health and safety perspective, it also ensured that the mental health windows were installed at ground level.

Obviously, not everything was done away from the Camden and Islington NHS Trust site. A significant proportion of the glazing, including the large curtain wall screens, was completed-on site.

The results

Highgate East was never going to be an easy job – and that is why we trusted to deliver it.

Logistics alone would have deterred many.

However, as always, it was delivered – and just as crucially, after 17 months, it was delivered on time in September 2024.

For our team, it was more than a job – it was a learning curve, one that has not only developed Polar NE’s expertise but also our confidence and capacity to deliver projects of any size and in location.