Car park
Steelwork creates
safe parking
7829 KINGS DOCK,Scale: NTS@A2 Auth By: CJG Drawn 20 Ground Floor West 50 Dearmans Place Manchester M3 5LH t 0161 833 0211 e info@lrw.co.uk www.lrw.co.uk
NSC
Apr 20
Containing 1,452 spaces, a new
multi-storey car park is due to
open at Liverpool’s Kings Dock
later this summer, replacing
a structure that suffered irreparable fire
damage on New Year’s Eve 2017.
Constructed on an adjacent plot to
the older structure, the new car park is
150m-long × 33m-wide, and including
ground floor and roof, it has eight levels.
It is a steel-framed structure, based
around a standardised column grid pattern
of 7.5m along its perimeter, with one line
of internal columns giving the car park two
spans of 16m-long. The steel beams support
metal decking and a 160mm-thick concrete
topping to form the composite floors.
“We looked at all framing solutions, but
went for a steel-framed option, with metal
decked floors and precast cores as it was the
most cost-effective method for this project,”
says Willmott Dixon Operations Manager
Peter Mason.
The damaged and, consequently unusable,
car park left a large hole in the city’s car
parking availability and Liverpool City
Council wanted a replacement to be built as
quickly as possible as the car park will not
only serve the nearby Liverpool Arena and
the waterfront, but also the wider city centre.
For this reason, speed of construction
was another important consideration that
had to be taken into account when choosing
the frame’s material. It was decided that
steelwork offered the fastest programme for
the project team.
Main contractor Willmott Dixon started
work on the new car park during the early
part of 2019, having previously worked on
the demolition of the adjacent damaged
structure.
“One of the key drivers for us was to
have a steelwork contractor on board that
could cope with the car park’s fabrication
complexities,” adds Mr Mason.
“All of the 16m-long beams are precambered
to create the 1:6 fall that each floor
has from both perimeters to the of the centre
of the structure.”
“Draughtsmanship was fundamental and
Leach Structural Steelwork has proven to
have been up to the task.”
As well as each floor having two cambers
they also slope in the other direction as the
car park has been designed as a Vertical
Circulation Module (VCM), which is said to
offer a more efficient solution for confined
city plots. This design contains no external
ramps as all of the circulation is via slopes
within the floors, which in turn creates more
parking spaces.
The steelwork programme was completed
during a five-month programme, using two
60t-capacity mobile cranes and two erection
gangs. They installed the steelwork in 10
phases – five on each side of the structure –
with each phase built to the full height of the
car park.
The perimeter columns are spaced at
7.5m centres, which was deemed to be the
optimum distance to create sufficiently wide
parking bays for most vehicles. To this end,
there are three × 2.5m-wide parking bays
between each set of columns.
Alongside the main steel frame erection,
Leach Structural Steelwork also fabricated
and installed the impact barriers and mesh
screens. The barriers are fabricated from
two CHS members, which are interlinked by
channels. They were delivered to site in fullywelded
7.5m-long elements.
Within the footprint of the car park,
there are five precast cores, two large
ones containing both lifts and stairs, and
in between three smaller stair cores. The
Clad in order to reference the city’s maritime past, a new multistorey
car park in Liverpool has been built using a steel frame as
the material offered the most cost-effective programme.
FACT FILE
Kings Dock car park,
Liverpool
Main client:
Liverpool City Council
Architect:
LeachRhodesWalker
Architects
Main contractor:
Willmott Dixon
Structural engineer:
Hill Cannon
Steelwork contractor:
Leach Structural
Steelwork
Steel tonnage: 2,700t
/Car_parks
/Braced_frames
/Car_parks#Column_positions
/Steel_construction_products#Decking_for_floors
/Floor_systems#Composite_slabs
/Concept_design#Concrete_or_steel_cores
/The_case_for_steel#Speed_of_construction
/Fabrication
/Design
/Construction#Mobile_cranes
/Steel_construction_products#Structural_hollow_sections
/Fabrication#Handling_and_transportation
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