Wednesday 28 March 2012

THE ROYAL STAR & GARTER HOME - SURBITON, update 27th March 2012

Morgan Sindall Project Manager Robert Siddens reports on likely activities over the next two weeks: The installation of the deep piled foundations is now complete and the tall piling rigs have left the site. The next operation is to expose the tops of the concrete piles to incorporate them into the foundations. These are called pile caps; they are 1 metre deep foundations made of concrete and steel reinforcement which sit on top of the concrete pile columns to take the load of the building columns. We are also about to start the construction of the basement. The walls of the basement have already been built using a system called contiguous piling. Essentially this means putting in over 300 piles next to each other forming the perimeter of the basement. Firstly we have to build a capping beam on this line of piles, similar to the pile caps, then we can excavate out the earth from the area which is to be the basement. This is approximately 2500m3 of London Clay to be dug out and transported to an old landfill site where it will be used for capping of the landfill for landscape reclamation. April is potentially a wet month - although you wouldn’t know it at the moment - and there is a risk that we may carry mud onto the road during the bulk excavation of the basement. To avoid this we have installed a bespoke wheel wash system which cleans the wheels of each lorry as it leaves the site. The beauty of the system we are using is that it recycles and filters the water it uses and only occasionally needs topping up. The topping up will be carried out using harvested rainwater from the roof of the house we are using as our temporary site office, therefore not using any extra water during this hose pipe ban period.

Monday 19 March 2012

Latest news from the Star and Garter Surbiton site

6th March 2012:

Morgan Sindall Project Manager Robert Siddens reports on likely activities over the next two weeks:

Activities on site will be intensifying with the introduction of a second piling rig for the main building foundations. The foundation piles are producing a lot of surplus soil which is having to be removed by lorry at regular intervals. Next week sees the introduction of a third piling rig. This is a mini version of the large machines specially designed to work in root protection areas. Also next week we will have finished the piles to the main entrance which allows us to install the wheel wash system. This is a ride on/ride off piece of plant which automatically detects when vehicles are leaving the site and cleans their wheels. It filters and reuses its own water to reduce water consumption and avoid sending any silt down the drainage system.

20th February 2012:


The installation of the piling mat is ongoing. This is a temporary bed of crushed concrete about 400mm thick and is necessary to provide a stable base for the piling rig.

To reduce the carbon output of the project we try to reuse materials wherever we can. An example of this is to reuse the material recovered from the deconstruction of the three houses previously on the site as part of the piling mat. The material has to be crushed down to a suitable size and this activity will be carried out on site over the course of a couple of days starting on 20 February.

27 February sees the arrival of the piling rigs. These are the machines which drill up to 20m into the ground to ensure the foundations for the new building are on solid material supported by the deep concrete columns. The type of piling that has been chosen is called Continuous Flight Auger piling. This is the quietest form of piling and involves drilling out of the ground and pouring concrete into the hole rather than hammering piles into the ground.