Cementation Foundations Skanska has negotiated further piling work in London’s Royal Docks regeneration area with a new order worth £1.5 million – due to be completed in September.
The latest award is for a luxury waterside residential development at Royal Victoria Dock called Capital East. It was awarded to the company on its ability to provide a multi-disciplined package to meet client Barratt Homes’ requirements for an integrated retail and residential waterfront development.
To support this structure 20 large-diameter marine piles will be constructed through an old concrete jetty, being kept along with its disused cargo-handling cranes. The piles will be bored 50 metres into the dock basin and encased over the top 13m with tubular steel liners.
Over 840 CFA piles will be cast to support the rest of the structures, avoiding the existing piles of a demolished warehouse and extending some 26 metres through the remains of Victorian finger jetties. Along the waterfront a 350-metre sheet piled perimeter wall will be driven to protect and retain a basement car park.
Contracts manager Kieran Tully said “In negotiating this contract, we committed a high degree of technical input at the design stage to meet the client’s requirements to transfer load directly to individual piles, which removed the need to break down each pile and form a pile cap. It ‘leap frogged’ the traditional approach and was environmentally friendly by reducing the waste removed from site”.
This contract follows a two phase £800,000 piling scheme for a 22,000 square metre office complex, overlooking Royal Albert Dock in the Royals Business Park, for Bowmer and Kirkland.
During the first phase 340 continuous flight auger bearing piles were installed down to a depth of 28m using the latest rigs in the fleet. In a significant departure from conventional pile-capping methods, Cementation Foundations Skanska floated off the CFA pile heads to a tolerance of 15mm so that slabs and columns could be cast directly onto them.
The second phase, for a road, required 400 driven cast-in-situ piles with flared heads constructed to the same exacting tolerances to reduce settlement in an area of soft silt and clay.