HBPW Silences The Doubters

When Buckingham Group Civil Engineering called HBPW with a rather juicy opportunity – the prospect of working with Britvic – there was a lot of doubt in the air as to whether the client’s ambitions were even realistic.

The tender was for the substructure works for a new 40m high clad rack building, destined to provide a home for the drinks giant’s new automated pallet handling facility at its current bottling and canning facility in Rugby.

That was the ‘job’. But the challenge? Cut the new warehouse into the side of an existing hillside!

HBPW decided to implement an exercise in Value Engineering, aimed at not only reducing the tendered value, but to also improve the prospect of a ‘win’ for the Buckingham / HBPW bid and, thanks to some innovative thinking, victory was achieved with one particular idea.

Managing Partner, Paul Withers, takes up the story: “Because of the constraints of the site, it was necessary to excavate into the side of a former hill to provide the necessary depth and support for the new warehouse floor. We had, in effect, to create a new plateau so that Buckingham’s could complete the construction element of the contract.

Value Engineering at its best – Britvic Rugby

“Pushing ourselves to the technical limit, we achieved this by drilling into the Charmooth mudstone and underlying blue lias, in order to install a contiguous bored pile wall stretching some three sides of the 210x65m site and comprising one hundred and sixty 1200mm diameter bored piles, each varying in retained height between seven and 12 metres in height.

“The real challenge was to limit the deflection of the wall to no more than 30mm so that adjacent buildings were not compromised.”

However, the ‘tight’ design led to a few sweating brows and nervousness from the client, contractor and Party Wall Surveyors.

In the final event, no ‘Plan B’ was required as monitoring showed that deflections were as low as 25mm, an outstanding result by any measure.

“There were so many people at the outset who said we were venturing into the territory of the near impossible. Now I am both delighted, if a little relieved, that HBPW’s engineering designs have been proved right, and that the boundaries of the ‘impossible’ have been stretched just that little bit further. Success honours the brave!”