Elephant & Castle

The 30 acre, £1.5billion, Elephant & Castle Regeneration is one of Europe’s largest city centre construction schemes providing 3,000 new homes, over 50 new shops, restaurants, a new park and significant infrastructure improvements.

As part of the infrastructure package, known as Sitewide, we began collaborating with Southwark Council and Lendlease a year before commencing on-site works, devising a robust traffic management plan and programme to minimise the impact of works on the surrounding area. The major infrastructure was designed to service all future plots on-site, and included over 800m of district heating, 1,250m of drainage and 4,500m of utilities - including BT, Thames Water and UK PowerOn.

The district heating pipework was laid along Heygate Street, a busy London street that remained in use throughout the installation. We also installed the boosted cold water for the scheme, and although the main potable supply was installed by a subcontractor, this process was managed by Careys. All utilities installations were managed by our highly-experienced utilities manager.

Our team provided a quick solution to an on-site issue when our utilities manager and his team identified the lack of a mains feed to one of the plots in the design plans. We installed a 63mm main to overcome this, working closely with Thames Water to deliver the asset.

We have successfully excavated approximately 150 live services during our works without a single service strike. This safety success can be attributed to three key processes: enrolling 35 personnel on a two-day ‘Buried Service Avoidance Course’, the use of air lances when digging around live services, and the creation of dedicated ‘trial hole gangs’.

Simultaneously to these works, we delivered our second landscaping contract, One the Elephant. These works included the installation of paving, planters, a water feature and street furniture, as well as provision of varying types of surface finishes.

The live urban environment presented multiple key challenges, including the logistics of working on both sides of the highway, while maintaining access to the various plots on which we were working. To overcome this, we installed temporary bridges and facilitated weekly plot interface meetings to ensure safe and efficient work by our operatives.

Daily co-ordination meetings between Black Hats, our on-site health and safety champions, were crucial for identifying and implementing improved methods of working. Furthermore, we developed a safety charter with LendLease at the start of the project to outline the key safety objectives.

A key health and safety improvement focused on our telehandlers. As the development site is spilt in two by Heygate Street, we are required to drive plant and machinery on the public highway. To ensure public safety, our team developed protectors to cover the telehandlers’ forks, resulting in two awards from LendLease.