Retail

Shops, malls and retail parks — big boxes, fast fit-outs and trading neighbours.

Retail construction is a frame, a roof and a deadline. The shell is usually the straightforward bit — a steel frame with big column-free sales floors, built for speed and repeated across a portfolio — and the generic civils behind it are the same shared methods you will find in the residential and commercial sectors, linked below. What makes retail its own job is what happens inside and around the shell: landlord works versus tenant works, services distributed to dozens of units, and shopfitting programmes that run to a marketing launch date, not a construction logic.

And then there is the small matter of the neighbours. Half of retail work is extension, refurbishment or reconfiguration next door to shops that stay open and trading throughout — hoardings in live malls, night-shift tie-ins, and deliveries threaded through car parks full of customers. The four guides in this sector cover the shell and structure, retail MEP and services distribution, shopfitting and fit-out, and phasing around live trading.

What does Retail cover?

• Shopping centres & malls
• Retail parks & big-box units
• High-street shops
• Tenant fit-out

Process guides in Retail

• Retail Shells & Shopping Centre Structures — Big-box portal frames and covered-mall steelwork — the landlord's shell, with docks, service yards and atria, built to a line the tenant's fit-out will be measured against.
• Retail MEP & Services — Landlord services, tenant connections, smoke control, food court extract and sprinklers — the engineering that keeps a mall breathing, lit and legally open, and meters every unit for what it burns.
• Shopfitting & Retail Fit-Out — From bare shell to open-for-trade — the tenant's fit-out: demising works, shopfronts and signage zones, back-of-house, deliveries and waste routes, all built inside the landlord's handbook rules.
• Phasing & Working Around Live Trading — Refurbishing malls and stores that never close — fire-rated hoarding in live environments, night works, customer segregation, phased handovers and the shopping-centre permit regime that governs every hour of it.

Shared methods used in Retail

• Site Access & Enabling Works
• Earthworks & Excavation
• Shallow Foundations
• Steel Frame Construction
• Concrete Frame Construction
• Roofing
• Façade & Cladding
• MEP First Fix
• MEP Second Fix & Commissioning
• Internal Finishes
• Testing, Handover & Snagging

Part of the Buildings group.