Construct - Issue 49

friendly environment and the main carriageway has been made narrower and simpler, to make it easier for road users to get into the right position on the road. There are also fewer places where vehicles can turn, which should reduce the risk of collisions. The pedestrian areas have been paved with York stone and granite setts, giving a high- quality finish that matches the surrounding buildings, and FM Conway has also put in seats, planted trees and installed sustainable drainage solutions (SuDS), which use natural methods to keep surface water out of the overloaded sewer network. FM Conway senior contracts manager Daniel Thomas says the main challenge on the project has been its location: “It wasn’t complicated, but because of the location, and having to retain access for buses and pedestrians, we had to remain adaptive and flexible. “A lot of time was spent moving things around and working in small areas,” he adds. “One construction phase could easily have 10 sub-phases. The City is far busier from Monday to Friday, so we did a lot of work on Saturdays and out of hours.”

One physical challenge the team had to deal with was the Tube station, whose structure is only just below the road surface. “We were very restricted in terms of the weight of machines we could use when we were taking up the road surface and laying the new paving,” explains Daniel. “Everything had to be done with small excavators or hand dug, which is much slower than using a large machine.” Removing the road construction also exposed some amendments that were made to the Tube station in the 1960s and 70s but had not been recorded – such as the power supply to some of the traffic signals running through scaffold tube from the station. “We were uncovering things as we were going that weren’t planned for, which was quite challenging from a programming point of view,” says Daniel. “We were good at being flexible and pivoting.” Bank station has 16 different entrances – the most of any station on the Tube network – of which nine are within the junction area. This made it particularly difficult to prevent the works disrupting pedestrian movements. “It was most problematic on the north side, because the footways were far narrower u

FACTS

Project Bank Junction Remodelling Client City of London Corporation Contract period 2022 - 2024 FM Conway divisions - Term Maintenance - Surfacing - Lighting

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