Ocean House given £1.5m upgrade

Dutch property company Wereldhave has invested £1.5m into the refurbishment of its 36,585 sq ft Ocean House office building in Didsbury.

The property is located within Wereldhave's 300,000 sq ft Towers Business Park in the south Manchester suburb. A ground floor office within the development is being launched to the market on Thursday 16 September.

An additional investment of £155,000 was made in creating a three year programme of new landscaping at the site, as well as new conferencing and meeting facilities.

The first and second floors comprise 24,868 sq ft which is taken by US conglomerate SPX Corporation on a ten year lease.

Wereldhave said the refurbished ground floor office covers 11,717 sq ft and benefits from a new entrance foyer.

Jonathan Speakman Brown, Wereldhave's managing director, said: "Our recent lettings coups have underlined the continuing attractions of Towers to the relocation market, particularly for this calibre of tenant requiring shared services functions. This provided the confidence to invest further in Towers and as a result of The John Lewis Partnership's and SPX's space requirements the opportunity to relaunch two ground floor opportunities to the market.

"In addition to the ground floor at Ocean House, we also have the ground floor available at Scotscroft where JLP and Vodafone occupy the bulk of the floorspace at the 57,265 sq ft building."

The £1.5m refurbishment project enabled Wereldhave to secure the SPX letting and was managed by Dominic Horridge, a building consultancy partner at OBI Property.

OBI, joint lettings agents on the scheme with GVA Grimley, also project managed the fit-out for tenant SPX on behalf of Wereldhave.

British Airways, Cisco Systems and Logica are also tenants at Towers Business Park.