Camden Lock

Working within a complex site with Regents Canal, Network Rail & Camden High Street all bounding the scheme required significant planning and management to ensure a suitable façade retention scheme was designed and installed prior to demolition of the properties, to preserve the historic streetscape. O’Keefe identified at the outset there was the potential for works to impact on the environment, and as such, produced an Environmental Aspects and Impacts Register which clarified the environmental aspects and impact for the works.

To enable the demolition works to be carried, a temporary façade restraint system that restrained the exterior walls. This was further complicated as the ground to first front and rear walls also needed to be removed to install new floor support at the front and new brickwork, ground to first, at the rear.

Demolition was carried out in a top-down sequence. As each floor was removed, flying shores were inserted and the scaffold dismantled down to the next level. This process continued until first-floor level where the front façade restraint system was added [to the towers] to allow the temporary needling to be installed and the existing steel supporting the first floor to be removed. Demolition progressively continued until basement level. The new basement slab was then cast and a reinforced concrete frame installed to ground floor level. The new structural steel frame comes off the
basement concrete to provide permanent support to the restored building.

Mace also required O’Keefe to provide local labour for the scheme as part of the local plan and community engagement programmes. O’Keefe provided five members of staff (demolition operatives and administrative roles) from within Camden borough for the duration and offered training opportunities to these members for further employment on other schemes.

Following demolition O’Keefe were contracted to complete the drainage & reinforced concrete package.

• Contract: Camden Lock
• Client: Mace
• Location: Camden, NW1
• Value: £2.4m
• Duration: 32 weeks
• BREEAM RATING: Excellent
• Scope: Demolition, Façade Retention, Basement Formation, Canal Boundary