Winvic shortlisted for student accommodation innovation award for Crown Place Birmingham

Winvic has been shortlisted for the Innovation Award at the Property Week Student Accommodation Awards for Crown Place Birmingham, the 33-storey, 814-bed student scheme where it operated a tower crane from the ground.

The contractor built the purpose built student accommodation (PBSA) scheme for repeat client Crown Student Living, with Yugo as operator. Winvic said the city centre site was constrained, with boundary clearances as tight as 35mm.

Winvic is also a category partner of this year's awards, sponsoring the Consultant of the Year Award.

Mark Jones, managing director for multi-room at Winvic, said: "The real success lies not only in the innovations themselves, but in the positive impact they had on safety, quality, programme certainty and sustainability."

The technology

Winvic said it was the first UK contractor to deploy the Skyline Cockpit remote tower crane system, which lets the crane be operated from a ground-level cabin. It said the system's cameras helped raise crane efficiency by 25%.

The system was adopted for the rest of the build after a 12-week trial at Crown Place. The crane was a 14-tonne capacity Potain MR225, to be climbed during construction to a maximum height of 102 metres, and the cabin's panoramic screen shows simultaneous views from seven cameras mounted on the crane. The trial was run in collaboration with Skyline Cockpit and Radius Group.

HP SitePrint, a robotic setting-out system linked to the building information model (BIM), printed more than 22,000m² of floor layouts onto the concrete slabs. Winvic said this let 10 trade contractors coordinate installations up to three times faster than manual setting-out.

GAMMA AR was used to overlay live BIM models onto the physical building to identify clashes before installation.

The project was Winvic's first use of a unitised brick facade system. The 2,768 prefabricated panels arrived complete with brickwork, windows and insulation, removing the need for external scaffolding.

An AmpD Enertainer battery energy system powered construction activities, which Winvic said removed the need for 7,645 litres of diesel a week. Other methods included an open-top goods hoist and KONE jump lift technology, which allowed early lift installation, according to the contractor's completion announcement.

The scheme

Crown Place stands on the corner of Lancaster Street in Birmingham city centre and comprises a 33-storey tower with adjoining nine and 12-storey blocks. It was designed by ECE Westworks and engineered by Meinhardt.

Winvic gave the bed mix as follows:

Room type	Bed spaces
Studios	572
Cluster flats	114
Duplex rooms	128

Winvic has described Crown Place as an £85m scheme. Corvette Capital's project page gives a gross development value of about £150m and says construction started in the second quarter of 2023.

Practical completion was achieved on programme in December 2025, Winvic said in its completion announcement. It said the scheme took its total delivery in the multi-room sector beyond 15,000 beds.

Alan Pulver, director at Crown Student Living, said at completion: "Through close collaboration with Winvic and Yugo, we have delivered a development that meets the expectations of modern students and adds real value to the city and its residents."

Skills and site recognition

Four T-Level students progressed into Winvic apprenticeships through the project, and the contractor said it ran 22 education engagement events for more than 400 students.

Crown Place received a Silver in the Considerate Constructors Scheme (CCS) National Site Awards, with extra innovation points for Skyline Cockpit, the HP SitePrint robot and Gamma AR. Separately, Winvic said the project was awarded Most Considerate at the CCS National Site Awards 2026.

What happens next

Winners of the Property Week Student Accommodation Awards will be announced on 1 December at the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge, London, according to Winvic.