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.