Cottons Centre

Live CHW Infrastructure Upgrade

Our engineers upgraded the 7 chiller CHW system without loss of cooling and completed 6 strategic crane lifts without disrupting daily operations at the Cottons Centre, London Bridge.

Cottons Centre is a 300,000 sq ft premier Grade A office space located on the South Bank of the Thames, in the heart of the London Bridge City estate. The building is in near constant use, with both offices and leisure facilities providing almost 24/7 occupation.

The project involved the removal of 6 existing chillers from the roof and the supply and installation of 7 new chillers, to achieve a total of 10 chillers serving the building.

Due to the interlocking nature of the multiple phases of work, and the multiple system co-dependencies, our logical and well conceived programme was vital to both the planning and the management of each portion of the project.

The existing chillers were operational throughout the works, and we factored in any steps required to prevent disruption to their operation in our RAMS. Our fully supervised out of hours cable pulling works were fully planned on our drawings. These showed bending radii, pinch points, and our builderswork requirements.

We managed 13 out of hours shutdown periods to allow the works to take place with zero disruption, our staff worked in shifts to ensure that we could achieve the programmed goals whilst still maintaining round the clock access to the building’s gym and leisure facilities.

The works at Cottons Centre were completed on time and without disruption, our building’s users were blissfully unaware of the myriad of works taking place across the building.

St. Martins Property

Planning, preparation, and pre-fabrication were used to help us beat the originally programmed completion date.

Prior to of our crane lifting works, thorough lifting plans showing temporary ground level based storage, road closures, safe access routes, and full weight calculations were issued. Our team had prior experience of crane lifts at Cottons Centre and utilised this whilst creating their plans.

We utilised our strong on site presence to ensure that the complexities of the works were discovered within the very earliest stages of the programme, and to ensure that any gained knowledge was retained for the entirety of the works.

Our project team was comprised of staff that had strong experience of working in similar projects. They focused on early engagement with the building’s staff in order to produce logistics plans to allow our survey and validation works to take place.

We employed a dedicated daily handover manager to cover any shift changes to ensure that any front of house areas were handed back to the client in a good condition, and any questions regarding the night’s works could be answered at short notice.

Our in-house 3D design team provided an accurate model from which all parties could prepare their materials off-site.

The building had 2 main cores with a wide roof span between them, we designed pre-fabricated pipework sections and delivered them into place upon a prepared steel framework that enabled a rapid connection of the various chiller enclosures.

Project breakdown