Real estate investor and developer Sixpenny Group plans to create an electric vehicle ’super charging hub’ at the Manor Royal business park in Crawley, West Sussex.
The project will replace a redundant 19,000 sq ft office block with 28 charging bays and two retail and restaurant units, which the developer is letting to a national supermarket and food-on-the-go operator.
Planning permission is being sought for the one-acre site, which is near Gatwick airport and surrounded by 600 local businesses with over 30,000 workers, says Sixpenny Group, which hopes to open the facility in early to mid-2025. Manor Royal is one of the largest business and light industrial clusters in the south-east of England and is home to a number of aviation services companies.
The hub will feature a mix of 22, 180, 240 and 400 kilowatt chargers, with eight dedicated charging stations for long wheelbase commercial vans. There will also be a high specification battery energy storage system capable of providing one megawatt output for two hours and allowing the hub to cope with demand surges, or power restrictions from the grid.
In addition to 5,500 sq ft of retail and restaurant units, the site will also feature a recreational ”pocket park” for customers and the public.
Sixpenny Group, which is working on the project with Arcus-PCD, plans further EV hubs across London and the south of England, and says it is ”actively working” on securing locations.
Egor Shestakov, director of Sixpenny Group, said: “This is a fantastic opportunity to transform unproductive office space into EV facilities that are very much in demand within the UK’s largest industrial business improvement district.”
