News
Shires Car Park on time and respecting Roman past 12 March 2007
Leading architectural and engineering practice Pick Everard has been working with Norwest Holst, Hammerson and Hermes to ensure that work on the Shires car park development is on time, on cost and preserves the city’s history.
The nine-storey, two thousand space car park, an integral part of Leicester’s £350m Shires redevelopment, is being constructed by contractor Norwest Holst (part of VINCI plc) above the site of several archaeologically significant remains. The most notable of these is a substantial Roman town house that stood on the site around 2000 years ago. This is one of the most important and complete structures recovered from the 100 acre civitas of Ratae Coritanorum, the Roman city that became Leicester.
University of Leicester archaeologists also found the remains of the lost church of St Michael’s, dating from the 15th century, and this was a significant factor on an already complicated multi-phase site. The design of the substructure and piling for the car park had to be amended to respect the archaeology.
Pick Everard and Norwest Holst have teamed up on a number of other innovative high profile projects, including the recent development of the new Leicester Grammar School site in Great Glen and five new schools in Derby in a PFI arrangement.
Pick Everard worked closely with structural engineers Waterman Structures to ensure that the archaeological remains are undamaged. This is vital so that they are preserved for future generations who will be able to use more advanced excavation and analysis techniques than we are currently able to. The continuity of occupation on the site, as with much of the city, is something that all building plans have to reflect.
“The adjustments to the original plans, hard ground and other difficult conditions meant that the construction work fell behind in the early stages, potentially jeopardising the proposed completion date of April 2008,” said Pick Everard architect Andrew Brown, “but the teams involved worked late days and weekends to ensure that the building of the car park would not delay the rest of the project, and they have just completed the first of the five stair cores on schedule.“
