Target group next door

The industrial upswing of the Adlershof and Johannisthal communities began in 1866 with the construction of the Berlin-Görlitz railway by the “Railway King” Bethel Henry Strousberg. Much has happened here since then: a strip for motorised aircraft, motion picture processing laboratory, barracks. More than 130 years after Strousberg, a Swiss railway building company has now placed the topping out wreath on the roof of a new head office in Germany. Operating on the tracklaying and repair sectors the Sersa Group is the first major tenant at the new industrial park on Gross-Berliner Damm 84 in the north of the Adlershof Business and Science Park. The premises were developed by TLG Immobilien GmbH.

It took TLG eleven months to clear the 50,000 square metres, dismantling the old factory buildings of the Heinkel works, wagon building halls and transport company garages. A total of 62,000 tonnes of concrete and tile debris were disposed of, and the area replenished with 13,000 tonnes of fresh earth. The beach volleyball sand proved a rich source of the unexpected, exposing sheet piling, old machine foundations and even one-man battle stations from World War II.

The decision not to sell the premises at Gross-Berliner Damm, but to develop them for own needs was a deliberate one. “Our target group is sitting just next door,” explained Peter Ehrlich, Project Manager at the TLG branch in Berlin-Brandenburg responsible for the business park. Referred to here are new companies at the founder centres of the technology park, companies whose developments have evolved into marketable products and who now want to grow and produce. Gross-Berliner Damm presents twenty thousand square metres of combinable hall and office space, divisible on the tenant’s request into units of 600 to 4,500 square metres. Production industries, machine builders, distributors, wholesalers and logistics service providers. Peter Ehrlich can foresee a great deal: “We would like to see companies with a perspective, for instance technology-oriented industries on the energy or environmental sectors.” Equipment, physical layout, supply parameters in the modern industrial buildings – all these can be defined by the future tenant.

Rico Bigelmann