The new Marks &
Spencer site for St Helens is located literally over the road from glass
manufacturer Pilkington United Kingdom Limited’s production facility – so it’s
appropriate that the firm’s glass will be welcoming customers into the store.
The glass was
produced at Pilkington UK’s Alexandra Works site, which supplies projects all
over the world, including recent installations in New York, Italy and Qatar.
However, this
project was much closer to home – just a few hundred meters away, in fact.
M&S decided to
relocate its St Helens store from the town centre to Ravenhead Retail Park,
with a refurbished unit that better suits customers changing shopping habits. The new store is an investment in the local community,
colleagues, and customers – both current and future. It offers a larger product
range, improved layout and is better integrated with M&S’s online services
like Click & Collect. It’s also more suited to busy families, with 1,000
car parking spaces, a café and an extended kidswear range.
The storefront makes use of Pilkington Planar
structural glazing, a frameless system that uses countersunk stainless-steel
bolts which sit flush with the external surface of the glass. This minimises
their appearance without compromising the integrity of the system. The bolts
are connected back to internal vertical glass fins to provide resistance
against lateral loads such as the wind.
The two-story façade
uses a combination of insulated double-glazed units on the upper floor and
laminated single-glazing on the lower level without compromise of appearance.
By including
double-glazing in the upper floor, the glazing has been given a lower U-value,
so less heat escapes through the glass, ensuring greater thermal efficiency
while creating a comfortable space to comply with building regulations.
Pilkington Optiwhite
true low-iron glass has been used throughout, ensuring that the glazing is
close to colourless, giving visitors a view through the shop front to the
product displays inside.
Screen printing has
been used on the units that sit in front of the steel frame and the space
between floors, disguising the building’s structure and providing a clean
aesthetic to the façade. This helps draw the eye towards the shopfront
displays, creating a more inviting experience for customers.
Pilkington United
Kingdom Limited was founded in St Helens in 1826 and it has produced glass in
the town ever since. It was there in the 1950s that the company invented the
float-glass process, in which a bath of molten tin is used to produce panes
that are almost perfectly flat. This is the way glass is produced all over the
world to this day.
Jamie Wood, director
at Pozzoni Architecture commented: "We are thrilled with the quality of
the completed scheme and pleased it has been very well received by the local
community."
Gary Stonelake,
business development manager for Pilkington Planar said: “As a business with
almost 200 years of heritage in St Helens, it’s very appropriate that this
significant new store for the town features our glass.
“This storefront is
another great example of how Pilkington Planar allows maximised sight-lines
for prospective shoppers while letting natural light deep into building
interiors and also delivering impressive energy-saving and safety performance.”
David Ayre,
Programme Manager at M&S said: “We work hard to make sure our stores look
inviting to customers, and that they feel airy and well-lit inside. It’s great
that for this store we were able to source the glazing that made this possible
from a very local supplier!”
