2015 Plummer House Case Study

CASE STUDY Ref: 6281D
PLUMMER HOUSE—FORMER CHAPMANS STORE
2015
£500K
CLIENT—ROBERTSON CONSTRUCTION
4 MONTHS
At the end of Summer 2015, Thompsons of Prudhoe
completed another tight and complex City Centre
demolition project at the former Grade II listed Chapmans Furniture Store in the centre of Newcastle. They
were appointed by Fusion Residential’s Principal Contractor, Robertson Construction Ltd, to carry out the
full internal soft strip, selected demolitions, asbestos
removal and associated works at Plummer House, Carliol Street in Newcastle upon Tyne, ahead of the site’s
redevelopment for student accommodation.
The site was divided into 3 zones, each requiring
differing levels of demolition work. Zone 1 comprised
the elegant Grade II listed front part of the site; the
centre part of the store, including a listed dancefloor
formed Zone 2, and Zone 3 comprised the rear part of
the site that had spanned the underground car park
and service entrance at the former store.
The site was located within a very busy part of Newcastle upon Tyne City Centre, adjacent to offices, bars,
a night club, hotel, NHS walk-in centre and a leading
architects practice located in the Grade II Listed Plummer Tower – only 4 metres from the edge of the site.
To add to the level of difficulty the site was on a bend
in the road and on a slope.
The surrounding footpaths and roads had to remain in
use throughout the course of the works. The whole
site was enclosed by robust wooden hoarding with a
controlled access gate. The desired position of a site
boundary on any demolition site is calculated at being
twice the height of the structure to be demolished.
Ideally, Thompsons would have had an exclusion zone
to the site boundary of around 48 metres – instead
the site constraints only allowed 4 metres. A Traffic
Management Plan was put into place before any work
could commence to ensure the safe movement and
interaction of site vehicles, other City Centre traffic
and most particularly pedestrians to, from and around
site.
The space around the site was so restricted that only a
half road closure could be put in place by Robertson
Construction, closing the northern side of Carliol
Street which bordered the southern site boundary.
Thompsons employed MTL Scaffolding Ltd to erect a
sheeted scaffolding externally to the full height of the
building around 3 of the elevations in order to provide
a safe working platform for the works to be conducted
and for a suitable ‘buffer’ zone to be in place. Thompsons also specified an internal ‘birdcage’ scaffold to
the third floor of the building in Zone 2 to protect the
listed dancefloor beneath. Each level of the scaffolding
was reduced periodically as the demolition prgressed.
CASE STUDY Ref: 6281D
PLUMMER HOUSE—FORMER CHAPMANS STORE
2015
£500K
CLIENT—ROBERTSON CONSTRUCTION
4 MONTHS
Prior to commencement of demolition works Thompsons’ specialist asbestos removal operatives completed the removal of asbestos materials in the building
and conducted a full internal soft strip to remove any
items remaining within the building, removing all fixtures & fittings and stripping the structure back to its
original shell to allow for a safe and unrestricted demolition. This technique also ensured that the resulting
demolition debris was as clean as possible so as to
maximise its potential for being recycled.
Due to the varying Zones, differing extent of demolitions required and extremely tight site constraints, the
specialist demolition team at Thompsons determined
to carry out the work using a mix of specialist techniques including manual work, robotic and minimachine, high-reach machine and finally traditional
machine demolition and clearance.
Following a temporary road closure agreed with Newcastle City Council, Thompsons’ in-house “Appointed
Person for Lifting Operations” designed and supervised the lifting by crane of 1 Bobcat skid-steer minimachine and 2 Brokk robotic breakers onto the roof of
the store to commence preparatory demolition works
from the top down. This was agreed to by the Robertson team after Thompsons’ independent specialist
structural engineering consultant RW Clarke Ltd had
carried out floor-loading calculations to prove their
preferred methodology was safe.
Zone 2 was brought down on a floor by floor basis by
the mini machines equipped with pulverisors and
breakers. The debris was carried from each floor by
the skid-steer and dropped down the existing lift shaft
within the building. This debris was then carried by
machine from the lift shaft and loaded onto Thompsons’ trucks in the existing loading bay of the building,
reducing noise, vibration and dust nuisance.
Following completion of the roof-level and other preparatory works the building was carefully demolished
from highest point at about 24m on the south-west
corner of Zone 3 using one of Thompsons’ high-reach
demolition spec 360o excavator machines. The highreach operator interacted with and was supported by
a trained demolition burner, working from a 25m
“Cherry-Picker” mast to both damp down dust and
assist with safely dismantling the structure’s steel
beams immediately bordering the site’s perimeter to
avoid any risk of debris falling outside the site’s tight
boundary.
Once the High-Reach machine had taken down the top
two storeys, additional demolition spec excavator
CASE STUDY Ref: 6281D
PLUMMER HOUSE—FORMER CHAPMANS STORE
2015
£500K
CLIENT—ROBERTSON CONSTRUCTION
4 MONTHS
machines were used to demolish the low level portions of the building and to sort, process and load the
resulting demolition arisings.
The site was too small to crush and recycle the debris
on site, but of the seven and a half thousand tonnes of
material that came off the site, over 98½% was recycled at Thompsons’ nearby Aggregate Recycling Facility in Gateshead, being used on other construction
projects in the region.
The Grade II listed structure at Zone 1 was left completely intact, having been stripped back within the
limits permitted by law. Zone 2 was partially demolished, removing all external render and all floors
above the undamaged Grade II listed dancefloor. The
whole of the part of the building in Zone 3 was demolished, its concrete floor and foundations removed, the
ground excavated and cleared down to several metres
below the surface and material supplied by one of
Thompsons’ quarries was placed and compacted in
layers in readiness to receive the specialist piling contractors and commence the construction phase.
The project was completed on time, within its 17 week
programme, taking 5580 manhours and with zero accidents. All demolition was carried out in accordance
with Thompsons’ accredited ISO9001, ISO14001 and
OHSAS18001 management standards and with
BS6187:2011 - Code of Practice for Demolition Operations.