Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

On the 29^th February I started work for Expanded Civil Engineering on the redevelopment of the Shell Centre. Expanded are a business group of Laing O’Rourke so all of the employees in the site office are Laing O’Rourke employees but are wearing the Expanded badge.

The project is a redevelopment of an existing site which was completed in 1962. The 1962 complex consisted of a high rise tower with a connecting 12 storey reinforced concrete low rise “horse shoe” shaped wing building. The existing structure is a concrete framed building above a podium with two levels of basement below. The site itself is adjacent to the major transport hub of London Waterloo. It is bounded by York Road to the east, Chicheley Street to the south, Jubilee Gardens to the west and the railway viaduct to the north. Running rail tunnels such as Bakerloo and Northern lines run beneath the site.

The redevelopment master plan has a mixture of commercial and residential buildings. The scheme retains the existing Shell Centre tower and site wide basement raft slab and walls with demolitions above and below ground, and with new construction comprising 2 commercial and 6 residential buildings with a two-storey basement in the north and a three-storey basement in the south of the site. It is worth noting that the residential buildings will have no social housing. The government requires up to a third of all new residential buildings to be affordable housing. However the owners have got round this by investing in a local school. It would appear there is far too much money to be made in this central location to waste it on social housing!

Site location

The proposed development will broadly comprise:

• Demolition of the existing site building, with the exception of the Shell Centre Tower
• Extension of the existing basement in the north east corner of the site and around the London Underground Ltd (LUL) ticket office
• Reconfiguration of the LUL ticket hall
• Construction of a new site-wide two-storey basement structure within the confines of the existing basement
• Construction of eight new mixed commercial / retail and residential buildings

Currently separate contractors, McGee, are completing the demolition of the existing buildings. They will demolish all the buildings down to their structural slab level. The site will therefore have multiple starting levels as shown below.

What the site should look like after the demolition works have been completed

The demolition works  will be ongoing for a number of months and leads to a very congested site. However, Expanded (and more importantly the client) are keen to get working the moment there is enough space so construction will start in the southern end and follow the demolition works sequentially through the site.

An example of how congested the site can be; the Expanded piling rig is in the background

There is also a growing concern with the construction plan changing last minute. McGee have proceeded with the demolition quicker than expected and the client therefore wants to accelerate the raft slab construction process. This would involve changing the whole sequence of slab pours and presents additional logistical challenges. The project engineer has so far not changed any plans as he is sure McGee will slow down soon.

An interesting factor has also occurred with a dispute between Expanded and McGee. It has been discovered that the guide wall for a secant pile wall has not been put in the right place by McGee (this has many in the Expanded office scratching their head as no one is sure as to why McGee, the demolition contractor, was tasked with casting a guide wall for Expanded). There is an ongoing dispute as to who is going to pay for it as the site was handed over, although no as-built survey was complete prior to hand over which is why no one has picked this up until just before the pile rig started piling.  The dispute is ongoing…

Red crosses show where the center of the piles should be compared to the guide wall

Currently we are in ‘the calm before the storm’; we will not be starting work on the basement raft slab until later this month and there is only minor ground works ongoing for the time being. In the mean time there is a lot of planning and work going on as most of the method statements for the works are yet to be written.  This is quite frustrating for me as I find myself (much like phase 1!) writing method statements for processes I have only ever seen on paper. As a result I have to ask for guidance every half an hour! However I will be getting plenty of time on site in about 2 weeks for the foreseeable future.

In other news if anyone on the patch in Kingston fancies a game of squash, Jonny and I play at 1930 on a Wednesday night.