Residential
Complex frame
accommodated by steel
26 NSC
Annual Review
A steel-framed solution was the answer for a
retirement village containing numerous room
configurations, spread over seven different floor
levels. Martin Cooper reports.
As the UK has an ageing
population, it is no surprise that
the construction of retirement
accommodation is on the increase.
One of the country’s leading providers is
BUPA-owned client Richmond Care Villages,
who are currently providing a retirement
village at Wood Norton near Evesham,
Worcestershire.
The £40M development, being built by
BAM Construction, will create 61 village
apartments for independent living, 46 suites
for assisted living, and a 60-bed care home
providing nursing and dementia care.
In addition, there will be a wellness spa,
lounges, library, terrace café, restaurant and
garden bar.
The project is located adjacent to an
exclusive hotel and BBC technical and
training facility. The retirement village’s
footprint was previously occupied by a
BBC-owned training and conference centre,
which was demolished as part of the project’s
early works.
FACT FILE
Richmond Wood
Norton retirement
village, Evesham,
Worcestershire
Main Client:
Richmond Care Villages
Architect: BAM Design
Main contractor:
BAM Construction
Structural engineer:
Rodgers Leask
Steel contractor:
Adstone Construction
Steel tonnage: 1,080t
Work initially included the team
removing roof tiles and felt from pitched
roofs to prevent bats from roosting, and
then stripping out asbestos from the
existing buildings prior to demolition. The
team then undertook groundworks that
consisted of 26,000m3 of overburden being
removed from site.
Most of the accommodation is within
one large building, with the exception
of 13 individual apartments which are
housed within a separate three-storey
steel-framed building.
The footprint for the main building
has a serious slope, with an 8m difference
from the top end to the bottom end. Two
5m-high retaining walls were installed to
form two steps for the building.
The walls split the building roughly into
thirds, with the top portion consisting
of four levels (0, 2, 3 and 4) and the
bottom third also consisting of four
floors, but these are at -2, -1, 0 and level
2. Incidentally floor 1 only exists in the
middle portion, which also includes -1, 2
and 3. The entrance to the village is at the
top end and at level 0.
Having such a complicated floor set-up
had a huge impact on the initial design of
the project as BAM Construction Project
Manager Paul Hayfield explains: “The
design intent was originally for a loadbearing
masonry frame, but we changed it
to a steel frame as masonry would have been
impractical for this form of construction.
The steel frame construction has certainly
given us a programme betterment.”
A steel-braced composite solution using
structural steelwork supporting metal
decking was the final design decision.
Consequently 1,080t of structural
steelwork, fabricated, supplied and erected
by Adstone Construction was used,
along with 14,347m2 of metal decking
supplied and installed by Structural Metal
Decks (SMD).
As well as a sloping site and the
subsequent floor level changes, most of the
building’s floors have different uses, which
adds to the complicated design as room
sizes and column locations change for
each floor.
“The design has to incorporate numerous
transfer beams to accommodate column line
changes and this is much easier to do with
a steel frame,” says Rodgers Leask Project
Engineer Craig Wynne.