Name: Martin Potterton MCIOB
Employer: Bovis Lend Lease
Project: Grand Arcade, Cambridge
Contract: JCT Major Works
In the heart of a city, a big project that looks solely to what happens on site can ruin the client’s relations with its neighbours and the public for a very long time. And if there was one thing that Martin Potterton’s client wanted – along with price, programme and all-round perfection, of course – it was to avoid any disruption to neighbouring businesses or Cambridge itself.
But avoiding that anti-social tag isn’t easy when you are building an anchor department store, 52 other shops in two-glass roofed arcades around a central atrium, a multistorey car park, a magistrates court and a triple-height link to an existing shopping mall. It was all on the site of a built-up area that had to be demolished and excavated during university exam periods.
Martin managed it so successfully that the project won an unheard of three consecutive Considerate Constructors Gold Awards with perfect 40/40 scores.
He modelled noise breakout from the site during the demolition phase to generate an acoustic map, and had the structural package subcontractors use it to project the impact of their works on all neighbouring properties. He then scheduled working hours around key problem times, such as exam sittings.
Martin was equally successful in overcoming the pure construction challenges. He delivered more than £2m worth of value-engineering by building the car park on a post-tensioned design, reducing slab thicknesses to meet height planning restrictions, using cantilevered piling in lieu of secant walls, and deep raft slabs rather than thin raft and piles.
To suit the large number of phased handovers, he insisted on controlling quality through hand-held computers and Hummingbird software. The result was a project with fewer than 200 snags at practical completion on nearly £100m of works.
Martin achieved or bettered each sectional completion date, despite unplanned archaeology delaying the car park by six months and the department store groundworks by four months. He still handed over the car park on a mutually acceptable date, avoiding damages. The anchor store was completed and trading a week earlier than originally planned. It was an achievement that delighted the client.