Project Spotlight: Whitehall Riverside, Leeds

Delivering precision detailing for a landmark riverside regeneration

Just a short walk from our head office in Leeds, the ambitious Whitehall Riverside development is taking shape as one of the city’s most significant urban regeneration schemes. With a project value of approximately £280 million, the development is transforming a key riverside site into a vibrant new quarter, blending modern living, commercial excellence and exceptional public realm.

The masterplan comprises over 500 Build-to-Rent apartments across two towers (rising to 15 and 18 storeys), alongside 253,000 sq ft of Grade A office space, a 108-bed hotel, and a multi-storey car park with 478 spaces. Sustainability is a cornerstone of the development’s ethos, with targets of BREEAM “Excellent” and HQM Level 4 set for the residential and commercial elements. Public spaces are being enhanced with riverside landscaping, semi-mature tree planting, and thoughtfully designed routes for walking and cycling.

Our Role

Shepherd Gilmour was appointed by Dearneside Fabrications to provide structural design services for a number of specialist items, most notably the external aluminium balustrades and the building’s dramatic lobby feature stair.

While modest in scale compared to some of our larger structural packages, the work demanded a high degree of engineering finesse and close collaboration with fabricators and architects to ensure that design intent, buildability and regulatory compliance were all achieved without compromise.

Lightweight Aluminium Balustrades

Installed along the external terraces of several buildings, the aluminium balustrades are a key feature of the development’s modern façade. Their role is not only to provide safety, but to visually tie together the terraces and outdoor spaces with crisp, minimal detailing.

Our scope included:

• Design to Aluminium Eurocode (BS EN 1999) – with meticulous checking of all extruded and rolled elements, down to individual fixings.

• Balustrade compliance with UK Building Regulations & BS 6180:2011.

• Fixing design for both top-mounted and slab edge conditions, adapting solutions to the variable structural interfaces across the buildings.

• Stiffness modelling using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) in highly loaded and constrained areas, enabling us to refine local connections for both strength and serviceability performance.

A particularly challenging area involved offsetting the balustrade from the slab edge. This required a custom-stiffened bracket to control rotation and ensure deflection limits were met. Our engineers used detailed FEA to understand the stiffness contributions of these brackets and their influence on the global behaviour of the balustrade system.

Feature Stair: A Lobby Centrepiece

Within the main commercial entrance, we engineered a lightweight steel feature stair, designed as a showpiece structure that draws the eye upon entering the building.

Our design focused on:

• Minimising visual weight, using a sleek steel frame to support open treads without the need for bulky supports.

• Integrated coordination with finishes, soffits and lighting to ensure the stair sat seamlessly within the architectural vision.

• Tight fabrication tolerances, achieved through early coordination with the fabricator to balance form, function and buildability.

The stair embodies the modern aesthetic of the wider development, offering a refined, visually open structure that complements the architectural language of the lobby space.

Whitehall Riverside: Our Reflection

Whitehall Riverside has been a rewarding project for our team—not only for the technical challenges it posed, but also for its proximity to our Leeds headquarters. It’s always a privilege to contribute to the skyline and public realm of our home city.

This project is a testament to the value of precise structural detailing in enhancing both the visual and functional quality of a development. Whether delivering finely tuned façade elements or elegant internal features, our team continues to demonstrate the importance of responsive, regulation-compliant engineering at every scale.

📸 Photography of the balustrade & stair installations are ongoing and more will be added as construction progresses.

👉 Read the full case study here: Whitehall Riverside