New Nursery Building, Royal Docks, London

This project comprises a nursery building in the Royal Docks, intended for use by the staff of the new EXCEL Exhibition Centre. It is constructed of a lightweight steel frame superstructure. The site was an extremely difficult one to deal with from the geotechnical aspect. The foundations of the Victorian dock piers still exist under at least 50% of the site area; these comprise 950 mm thick masonry walls to a depth of 9.5 metres. The remainder of the site is underlain by 6 metres of weak fill material over 3 metres of peat and soft clay over dense gravel at 10 metres depth. The foundation solution developed after extensive site survey work is of a grillage of reinforced concrete ground beams supporting an entirely pre-cast ground floor slab and the steel superstructure. The in-situ concrete grillage is itself supported by the existing Victorian heavy masonry pier foundations and by an irregular network of concrete piles driven through to the gravel where original foundations do not exist. We are particularly pleased to have developed such a hybrid solution as without this the project would not have been viable.

Architect Walters and Cohen