University College London’s new Dagenham lab is a step closer to reality after it signed a contract buying land from the council at the old Sanofi site in east Dagenham.
The university bought the plot from the council's trading arm BD Group for its Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (Pearl) at a ceremony on Friday, January 10.
The new lab is designed to simulate large environments like train stations or town centres and test people's reactions to them in detail.
Barking and Dagenham Council approved the plans for the new lab, which includes a decommissioned aeroplane fuselage and train carriages to simulate public transport, at the beginning of November last year.
At 14 metres tall and around the size of a football pitch - covering 4,000 square metres - Pearl will be able to simulate spaces, sounds and smells.
Researchers and students are set to study variables as small as brain activity and as large as crowd behaviour. The facility will test things like how spaces affect disabled people and those with dementia.
On top of the research capability, the building is also designed to be carbon neutral through measures like solar panels.
Nigel Titchener-Hooker is dean of engineering at UCL. He said: "The way [Pearl is] designed will encourage people to experience buildings and engineering in a different way," adding the building is designed precisely so experiments carried out there can be repeated.
Pearl, which will be carbon-neutral if built, is expected to be completed in 2020.
UCL and the council is also hoping the new lab will be a new asset for colleges in the borough.
"Being here in Dagenham is important," added Mr Titchener-Hooker.
"The is an opportunity for the community not only to understand what research looks like, but for us to work with them in terms of understanding their needs and trying to address them.
"Pearl is intrinsically practical in terms of the sorts of things we're looking at. What I hope we're able to demonstrate through the experiments we're run there is that these are things people can relate to."
This isn't UCL's first foray into east London, with parts of the architecture and engineering departments moving to Stratford in neighbouring Newham.
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