When The Going Gets Tuffnells!

HBPW has been helping one of the largest independently owned British parcel delivery companies to meet increasing demand at one of its northern depots.

Tuffnells Parcels Express was established almost a century ago and specialises in coping with increasing demand for next day business to business delivery across the UK.

But demand for its services has been so high in one part of the country, that a new 500m² extension has had to be built onto its distribution centre at Haydock in St Helens, Merseyside.

Design engineer and Partner, Emyr Parry, said: “Tuffnells has more than 700 vehicles operating out of some 30 strategically based depots across UK and Ireland, so this is a substantial operation.

“Demand has been particularly high at the Haydock depot, which is located on the Yewtree Trading Estate, Kilbuck Lane, a centre of some considerable activity bearing in mind that it is surrounded by a number of motorway networks.

An internal perspective

“We were asked to create an extension to the existing warehouse featuring dock levellers, which enable vehicles of differing sizes to quickly load and be on their way, hard standing areas and underground drainage,” said Emyr.

However, completion of the parcel sorting facility was not without its challenges.

“The ground in the area was considered to be ‘made ground’ which meant it could, theoretically, have been made up of any range of unsuitable materials and potentially unable to support the weight of the building. We had to be sure that it was capable of taking the new structure’s weight and decided to carry out our own ground investigations.”

Our own geotechnical team eventually gave the all clear and production capacity at Haydock has now massively improved thanks to the new facilities.

Client:             Tuffnells

Contactor:       HB Projects