1 Westminster Bridge

1 Westminster Bridge

This high profile project situation in the heart of the capital saw the demise of a famous landmark to make way for a rather more impressive one!

We were contracted to remove the former Greater London Council offices over a 26 week period. Our work included asbestos removal, soft strip, temporary works and demolition. The structure comprising 35,000 tonnes of mass reinforced structural concrete had to be demolished and removed from site, whilst retaining the suspended ground floor slab housing the basement.

In line with our policy to eliminate personnel working at height, we decided against scaffold encapsulation and de-construction and developed schemes to demolish with high reach equipment.

To demolish this structure, with structural beams 1.5m in depth our plant department advised that a 6.0 tonne attachment would be required (twice the weight of a conventional configuration). To accommodate heavier attachment, we engineered a heavy duty boom (35 tonnes) to operate from our 90 tonne base machine, which worked off temporary steel props situated in the basement.

The site which was encapsulated within a live traffic island and situated on the bank of the Thames, with neighbours such as The Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, The London Eye, County Hall, St Thomas Hospital and Waterloo Station, meant that environmentally and logistically, this was an extremely complicated project to complete.