Peat House

Peat House

This large complex city centre office block demolition managed by Atkins Faithful and Gould presented many problems to our in house team of experts.

A major challenge, during the 22 week project, was minimising the disruption to our neighbours which included global firms of Accountants, Lawyers and Hoteliers situated in the heart of the Birmingham’s business quarter. It is fair to say they were not enamoured with the prospect of potentially disruptive demolition work!

To minimise disruption we met with all adjacent occupiers to understand their concerns and explain fully how we would operate and the impact to them. During these early meetings, relationships were developed that we worked hard to maintain throughout the project period.

Our open flexible approach to requests to reduce our environmental impact, by ceasing noisy operations during agreed times and working out of sequence, was key to the success of this project.

In undertaking work, we prepared internally, removing deleterious material from the floors and the fabric of the building and scaffold encapsulated external elevations. The pre-cast concrete structure was then dismantled using a fleet of specialist compact plant with remote control and rotary concrete processors. A luffing jib crane was employed to lift down the pre-cast concrete cladding panels each weighing up to 7.0 tonnes and these were then processed with a 360 degree excavator at ground floor level.

We systematically reduced 10 storeys of the tower by dismantling, at which point the lower 3 levels were reduced using a 360 degree excavator working behind the scaffold. The majority of the sub-structure was removed, with the perimeter basement retaining wall propped using structural steel.