Case studies

Company: Blue Sonic Ltd
Development: The Nurseries, Lewes, Sussex
comprising of 18 No. 3 & 4 storey town houses

Blue Sonic is a forward looking innovative developer that was looking at ways to take the vital part of the build process offsite. Having run and managed a traditional building site on their first development they were keen to look at how they could simplify the build process by using modern methods of construction and specified a watertight superstructure up to first fix finish.

This development had a number of problems for the developer in that part of the site has been known to flood and so two of the three terraces could not have habitable rooms on the ground floor. It also meant that they had to have piled foundations as well as large water storage tanks just outside the buildings. This left us with a number of challenges, namely we could not put our cranes in the optimum position for the erection of the buildings due to the water tanks. Therefore we had to move the position of both the crane and the delivery lorries to take this into account and to also increase the crane size from 50 tonnes to 100 tonnes! However we still erected all eighteen houses, 8 four storey terraced houses and 2 blocks of 5 two and a half story buildings in just 2 months and this albeit periods of excess rain fall and fairly strong wind condition.

View video 'Building of the nurseries'

Download Timber Journal Lewes article (PDF format, 1.6 MB)