News
13 May 2009
Two Highly Commended Projects at 2009 East Midlands Merit Awards
At the 2009 Institution of Civil Engineers’ (ICE) East Midlands Merit Awards held on Friday 24 April, two Pick Everard projects were ‘Highly Commended’. The first, in the Out of Region Project Category, was awarded to Cannon Kirk’s Highfields Housing Development project in Littleport, just north of Ely in Cambridgeshire, for which Pick Everard was principal designer and Durman Stearn was principal contractor. The second, in the Small Project Category, was awarded to the River Tweed Improvement Scheme at Barwell in Leicestershire, for Hinckley and Bosworth Borough Council, for which Pick Everard was principal designer and consulting engineer.
Partner at Pick Everard Duncan Green comments, “Pick Everard is delighted that these two schemes were Highly Commended in the 2009 East Midlands Merit Awards – although very different in scale, both demonstrate innovative engineering design in practice, for the benefit of people living in these communities.”
Cannon Kirk Highfields Housing Development
Developer Cannon Kirk has a history and reputation for high quality housing in the East Anglian region. Its visionary approach to the blank canvas of the greenfield Littleport site was to involve all three main design disciplines - architecture, landscape and highways in a complete re-think of housing estate road design. Littleport is an excellent example of innovative design ideas being realised through collaboration between highway design engineers, architects, landscape consultants, planners and highway development control engineers.
The intention was to return streets to the community, creating high quality communal spaces between houses for pedestrians and cyclists, typical of market towns before cars were invented. Ancient oak trees and established hedgerows were all protected and along the High Street, formal squares intersperse blocks of houses, with informal blocks on the back streets. Roads of varying widths evolved by filling the spaces between blocks and follow an unconventional, undefined route working around protected trees. Landscape features soften the street scene and attractive informal communal spaces result, designed to encourage social interaction between residents. Highfields comprises 737 houses currently under construction, with Phase 1 of 4 complete.
Sustainability was an important consideration from the start and all surface water run-off from roofs and hard-paved areas flows to a purpose built open storm water detention area at the western edge of the site, now an established wildlife habitat, attracting birds. Streets and house floor levels were also designed to minimise disposal of surplus material off-site during construction and locally sourced aggregate materials were used to build roads. Street lighting columns and lanterns were chosen to enhance the street scene and be the most economic in terms of energy consumption and running costs. The contractor worked closely with the design team to produce a high quality finish, and the careful choice of street surface materials complements the architectural features and is an integral part of the street scheme.
Cannon Kirk’s CEO Mike Broughton commented, “Being Highly Commended in the East Midlands Merit Awards recognises the attention to detail that has been at achieved our prestigious Littleport development.”
River Tweed Improvement Scheme, Barwell
In the village of Barwell in Leicestershire, the River Tweed has a history of flooding but in the summer of 2006, a section of the riverbank collapsed, exposing a public sewer. Repairing and stabilising a short length of collapsed riverbank should have been a small project yet difficult site constraints threatened to turn it into a potentially impossibly invasive and expensive scheme.
The section of riverbank had a 525mm diameter foul sewer running directly under it at a shallow depth. Severe winter rainfall when works were being carried out would cause more flooding so a cost effective and innovative engineering approach was called for. The solution turned out to be surprisingly simple, neat and low in impact. Unstable bank areas that were being supported by sand bags, old bricks, trees, roots and fence posts were replaced with Deltalok geotextile bags filled with an 80:20 stone and pre-seeded topsoil mix, laid in rows to form a new retaining structure. Bags were worked around trees and manholes and manhandled into place where access proved difficult. Interconnecting plates locked the rows together so that filled bags formed a solid unit. After a few months, grass grows through bags, so knitting the bank together, improving its visual appearance and helping to re-establish the natural watercourse habitat.
The load on the sewer using this method is no greater than normal subsoil conditions and fully acceptable to water utility companies such as Severn Trent Water and being a softer solution than sheet piles or concrete, is also acceptable to The Environment Agency. The solution was environmentally sustainable as nearly all material excavated on site was reused with very little was imported and relatively inexpensive compared to the other options considered. Construction work was carried out by Newline Civil Engineering, by hand or using a mini excavator, undertaken in small sections to minimise the risk of further erosion in the event of high river flows and was completed in December 2008.
