I’m finishing up here and while I’m going through old files and cleaning out drawers I’ve started to wax philosophically about all the projects I’ve worked on over the past five years. My first large scheme and the project I used for my Civils exam was Larden Road.
Larden Road was a £68 million housing scheme with a mix of for sale/affordable residential and commercial units. The project comprised approximately 500 individual residential units spread across a 2.1 hectare site. The small plan area of the site required that the units be situated in high density multi-storey buildings with a central private access road. The site is located within the floodplain of the river Thames.
This resulted in a host of design and feasibility problems. I think this project has a special place in my memory because I was part of the team that not only secured planning for the scheme, but also part of the design and build design team for the contractor who built it. This meant that I wrote a Flood Risk Assessment, carried out preliminary designs for costing, produced construction information and saw the construction through to site.
The site:
The Microdrainage Model:
The basic idea is that the Environment Agency asked us to attenuate to Greenfield rates. This meant we needed a large amount of attenuation in order to achieve the required volume of storage necessary to meet the rates. I designed a system that cascaded permeable paving zones through the site with a single outfall. I even selected recycled material for use beneath the paving.
The recycled material:
And the finished product:
