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Marischal College council HQ throws open its doors to first customers

Aberdeen City Council’s new corporate headquarters in Marischal College will throw open its doors next Tuesday [21 June] to welcome in the first customers.

The Customer Service Centre will open up on the ground floor at 10am – giving the citizens of Aberdeen the chance to visit the building for the first time since the near-completion of the three-year project to restore and transform the historic structure into the City Council’s main base.

The Centre will provide the wide range of services now offered at The Point next to St Nicholas House and will also handle queries from the public on:

• council tax and benefits

• housing applications and advice

• debt advice

• social care

• homelessness services

• registrar services

• licensing

There will also be a facility to pay for services by credit card, debit card and via cheque payments.

The Centre’s normal opening hours will be 8.30am–5pm. As more and more City Council staff move into Marischal College from St Nicholas House and other council offices over the summer months, more services will become available – including council tenancy enquiries, planning matters and environmental health queries.

The experience of visiting the Marischal College Customer Service Centre, which will have a staff of 38, will mark a radical change from the way in which customer services have been delivered by Aberdeen City Council in the past.

People with queries or issues to raise will be greeted by a customer service adviser, who will issue them with a ticket and direct them to the appropriate service desk or waiting area. A queuing system will be in operation to help customers access the right service.

A range of self-service facilities will be available at the Centre, allowing citizens online and freephone access to council services.

The customer service advisers will be on hand to help with enquiries and with form-filling, and will provide general service-related advice. There will also be a team of dedicated officers, who will be available to offer in-depth advice on specific services at one of the 14 desks provided in the Centre. Confidential matters can be discussed in one of the five interview rooms.

Opening and closing arrangements for services which are moving into Marischal College are:

• Registrars / Housing Applications and Advice (Goodapple) / Debt Advice

These services will close on Monday 20 June and re-open at the Marischal Customer Service Centre from 10am on Tuesday 21 June.

• Homelessness Service

The homelessness service reception at St Nicholas House will close at 2pm on Monday 20 June and re-open at the Marischal Customer Service Centre from 10am on Tuesday 21 June.

• The Point / Crown House

The Point will close for business at 5pm on Friday 17 June. The Crown House council tax and benefits office will close at 4.30pm on Monday 20 June. Services previously based at both these facilities will be provided at the Marischal Customer Service Centre from 10am Tuesday 21 June.

Access to the Centre is via the new revolving door in the pend at Marischal College, Broad Street. The address is Aberdeen City Council Customer Service Centre, Broad Street, Aberdeen, AB10 1AB.

The ground floor also features a separate reception area to welcome people with pre-arranged meetings with council officials, with normal opening hours of 8am–5.30pm.

City Council employees, meantime, have begun to move into the new five storey-office space. The final kitting-out of the accommodation to allow for the phased relocation of 1,323 staff is taking place each successive weekend until the start of September, involving groups of between 80 and 150 employees. Staff, heads of service and directors will be based in the building, which will also have a workspace for Chief Executive Valerie Watts – but city councillors will be staying in their existing accommodation in the Town House.

Some two-thirds of the world’s second largest granite building has been leased from the University of Aberdeen for 175 years for just £4.7million to create the new offices.

The transformation of the historic building, which has involved 565,000 man-hours of work, has been completed on schedule and under budget. The original budget was set in 2006 at £80.4million but now looks likely to involve capital expenditure of around £65million.

Contractors Safedem began the demolition and façade-retention work in summer 2008, followed by Sir Robert McAlpine in summer 2009 who were charged with the rebuild within the impressive 105-year-old granite façade to create 174,000sq ft of modern, open-plan, efficient and sustainable office space. The pale high-quality Kemnay granite facade was restored to its original glory by scrubbing off 100 years of grime to leave the building looking much as it would have done when it was opened by King Edward V11 on 27 Sept 1906.

The ornate, wood-panelled former Senate Room – renamed the Grant Room in memory of former University Court member Sheena Grant – has been retained in its original state and will become a popular wedding venue, accommodating up to 60 people and offering easy access to the impressive setting of the Quadrangle for post-ceremony photographs.

Citizens and visitors to the city will also have open access to the Quadrangle during working hours and the space will be used for events for up to 2,000 people.

The building has been officially rated "excellent" for its environmental sustainability, with a biomass boiler providing a quarter of its heating, the widespread use of natural light, and the ‘smart’ lighting system which senses movement and switches on in response. The building also features cycle racks, changing rooms and showers in the lower ground floor to encourage staff to use sustainable forms of transport to work – and Marischal College could be linked up in future to the City Council’s energy-efficient district heat and power system.

City Council Leader Councillor John Stewart, who chairs the Marischal College Project Board, said: “I am proud and delighted to say that the project has been a huge success. I and my fellow councillors kept an extremely tight grip on the finances from day one and we are now able to say that it has been completed bang on time and well under the original budget.

“A huge team of people worked hard as a productive partnership on the scheme – councillors, our own staff, architects, demolition crews, the construction company, civil and structural engineers, building services engineers, quantity surveyors and project managers.

“What we have collectively achieved is the completion of one of the most exciting construction projects in the whole of the UK and a civic building in which the people of Aberdeen can take enormous pride.”

Aberdeen City Council Chief Executive Valerie Watts said: “The City Council has brought to fruition a remarkable project which has created a stunning new public building for all the people of Aberdeen. It will be admired far and wide by citizens and visitors alike and will become the iconic image for this proud city.

“The completion of Marischal College also marks the start of a new era in the life of the City Council. This building will have a transformative impact on the way we do business with the citizens we are here to serve. It will modernise and improve the way in which we deal day to day with the people of Aberdeen and everyone in the city should see the difference.”

The A-listed Marischal College, designed by A Marshall Mackenzie and Archibald Simpson, is of national significance. The renowned frontage was completed in 1906 at the height of the Aberdeen granite industry but lay vacant and neglected for many afters after the University of Aberdeen quit the building in 1990s.

Several private sector schemes were mooted over the following years but failed to proceed. Aberdeen City Council approved the lease of the building from the university in 2005 to create a new corporate headquarters after it emerged that the proposed conversion was the most cost-effective solution to modernise the council’s accommodation.

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