The design retained the original brick façades on three sides of the building while demolishing and reconstructing the structure behind them. This required meticulous planning and engineering. Working within the standing façades, much of the new foundation work was carried out under restricted headroom using a compact piling rig to bore, excavate and construct the new ground slab in carefully sequenced phases as the existing slab and foundations were removed.
As part of this work, Graham removed 448m3 of concrete from the ground, with 430m3 of it being crushed and re-used for the piling mat.
The site’s location alongside the River Thames presented further engineering challenges. Graham installed a sheet-piled cofferdam to facilitate the works, while scaffolding was erected and wrapped over the river to prevent any contact with the riverbed.
Operating within a highly constrained site, bordered by the river on one side and residential properties on the other, Graham implemented a remote materials compound to shuttle deliveries in smaller loads and restricted the tower crane‘s operating radius to mitigate disruption to neighbouring properties and the local community.
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