Camden Goods Yard

Basement optimisation saved £2m and increases parking bays with NWR & TW constraints

The heavily constrained Camden Goods Yard site is a large residential development which will feature a new rooftop farm-to-fork restaurant, an exclusive wellness suite with gym, indoor swimming pool, sauna & steam room. The site is heavily constrained with Network Rail lines to the west and east, residential properties to the north and south and multiple large diameter Thames Water sewers beneath, making ground stability and stakeholder liaison during the works critical.

When Walsh joined the project, the initial drawings included a third level of basement for swimming pool plant adjacent to Block A core requiring an additional 5m of excavation.

We worked collaboratively with the design team to have the plant room relocated, and, by challenging the internal configuration and rearranging the basement to optimise layouts, we avoided the unnecessary excavation. This was all done whilst saving 129 piles and 540m3 bulk dig.

In optimising the basement layout, the Walsh solution also enabled additional car parking bays to be created.