100 West Cromwell Road

The 100 West Cromwell Road re-development comprises 460 new affordable and private apartments along with commercial, retail and flexible space, all built above an existing supermarket car park. The development is further complicated by its proximity to both LUL and Network Rail lines and a clear route needed to be kept open through the basement for construction traffic to the adjacent Earls Court development.

We enabled much of this project to reuse the existing piled foundations, using the principles set out in BRE EP75: Reuse of Foundations for Urban Sites (RuFUS). Walsh carried out a comprehensive back analysis of the structure which justified, wherever possible, the reuse of the existing sub and super structures. Partial demolition and reconfiguration of existing structures allowed the erection of eight buildings up to a maximum of 31-storeys.

On the 31-storey tower, the Walsh Geotechnical team calculated that existing piles could be re-used in conjunction with a new piled raft foundation and several additional new piles. An independent review of ground investigation data was carried out, as well as initial hand calculations to back analyse existing pile lengths and check the overall factor of safety using the proposed piled raft system.

Following this, a PLAXIS 3D finite element analysis checked individual pile loads against ultimate capacity. Settlements and raft / pile spring stiffness values were extracted from the PLAXIS model, allowing assessment of differential movements and providing data to feed into Walsh structural analyses. This delivered significant improvements to the predicted settlement along with solutions that minimised differential settlement problems.