Islington has awarded a £1.7m contract to replace the Wray Crescent pavilion, out of use since 2017. Work starts in December and finishes in summer 2027.
Islington Council has awarded a £1,716,472.20 contract to build a new community building at Wray Crescent Open Space in Holloway. It replaces a sports pavilion that has stood unusable since 2017.
The contract went to T&B Contractors. The Corporate Director of Community Wealth Building signed the key decision on 17 September. The figure excludes VAT, and the contract runs for eight months with options that could take it to fourteen.
The open space lies off Wray Crescent in Holloway, N4, and the report gives the ward as Tollington. The officer report says the old pavilion was decommissioned in 2017 after structural failures. Nine years on, nothing has replaced it.
What gets built
The new building is single storey and goes on the footprint of the old pavilion, at a similar scale. The report lists what the contract covers:
- demolition of the existing pavilion
- foundations and groundworks
- a new community room, changing rooms, a kitchenette and accessible toilets
- an office for the council’s Parks Service
- internal finishes and fittings
- landscaping, an enclosure for the air source heat pump, and external storage
- further works in the wider park
Heating, cooling and hot water are all electric, run off an air source heat pump. The roof is a biodiverse green roof. The report says every tree removed must be replaced with four more in the surrounding area, which was a condition imposed at the planning committee.
Why the council could not simply leave it
The report is unusually direct about this. Wray Crescent has the borough’s only publicly accessible cricket pitch, and the council’s own planning policy works against losing it.
Policy DM6.4 of Islington’s local plan says applications that would lose an existing public sport or recreation facility will normally be refused unless the same type of facility is re-provided, the quality is enhanced and the quantity maintained. The officers put it plainly: because there is an existing cricket facility, the policy requires the council to re-provide and enhance it “or risk having planning permission refused”.
Doing nothing was considered and rejected on those grounds.
Why it took nine years
The delay is mostly a procurement story, and the report sets it out step by step:
- summer 2021: public consultation, including 2,200 leaflets to residents and two evening Zoom sessions
- February 2024: planning application submitted
- August 2024: planning permission granted
- December 2024: procurement strategy approved, using the Pagabo framework
- February 2025: tender published. Three returns came back, and all were “significantly above budget”
- the council looked for extra funding, which “took some time”. By the time it decided, the best-placed contractor could no longer commit to the timeline
- an alternative framework was explored, but suppliers showed limited interest in the relevant lot
- 1 April 2026: the Corporate Director approved a switch to an open tender through the London Tender Portal
- April 2026: a pre-market notice drew 44 expressions of interest
- 30 April to 10 June 2026: the invitation to tender ran. Sixteen submissions came in and twelve compliant ones were evaluated
- 17 September 2026: contract awarded
So the second attempt, run by the council itself rather than through a framework, produced four times as many bidders as the first.
The money and the conditions
The project is funded from the Wray Crescent capital line, which has a 2026/27 budget of £2.044m. That comes from a mix of section 106 and community infrastructure levy contributions from development in the borough, plus borrowing. The report says a 10 per cent contingency is held against unforeseen variations.
Bids were scored on six criteria:
| Criterion | Weighting |
|---|---|
| Cost and price | 50% |
| Social value | 20% |
| Programme | 10% |
| Delivery | 10% |
| Quality control | 5% |
| Health and safety | 5% |
The tender scores themselves are in an exempt appendix and are not published. Payment of the London Living Wage is a condition of the contract. The winning bidder committed to a donation to a local initiative, volunteering with local groups, spend with local small businesses, a work placement and educational projects with local schools, and named a resident liaison officer to handle notice of works and access changes.
The report also says anti-social behaviour around the old pavilion is being “designed out” through new fencing, lighting and strategic hedging.
The timetable
- contract signing: October 2026
- mobilisation: November 2026
- construction: December 2026 to June 2027
- handover and completion: June or July 2027
What it means for you
If you use Wray Crescent, expect disruption from December. The council’s equalities assessment says some parts of the park will be inaccessible while the work goes on, and the contractor must produce a construction management plan setting out when noisy work and deliveries can happen. The report commits to keeping access to the park open and safe throughout, and to giving residents advance notice through the resident liaison officer.
If the timetable holds, the changing rooms and community room open in summer 2027, and the cricket pitch gets its facilities back for the first time in a decade. The community room is meant to be bookable for classes and events, not just sport, though the council has not yet published booking arrangements or charges.
The wider park improvements were shaped by a separate consultation on Let’s Talk Islington. Planning permission for the building was granted in August 2024, and decisions like it turn up on our Islington planning news page. For what is open and running in the borough’s parks while this one is a building site, see things to do in Islington.
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