28 October 2013

The Costain Laing O’Rourke JV team expanding London Underground’s Bond Street station is working “24/7” as it presses on with the project.

The site is as busy at night as it is during the day, as the team works to increase the capacity of the station which houses Central Line and Jubilee Line platforms.

The expanded Tube station will join with the adjacent new Crossrail station to form one overall facility that will allow rapid transfers.

More than 155,000 passengers currently use Bond Street daily, a figure expected to rise past 225,000 with the arrival of Crossrail in 2018.

Work is focusing on the north side of London's Oxford Street retail hub to boost capacity and create step-free access to the station.

In recent months this has included the demolition of an adjacent building – including the removal of a 1.5-metre thick concrete slab that formed the vault of a bank that formerly occupied the site.

At one point it was thought that small explosive charges would be required to remove the slab, but in the event, mechanical breaking-out caused less noise nuisance than anticipated and the latter method was used to complete the slab’s removal.

Since then, work on the basement and sub-basement of a new building has got underway. This will eventually be completed as apartments but is being used temporarily as a crane hall. Two shafts will be sunk inside it, from which tunnelling can be undertaken early in 2014.

This building will be given temporary cladding that will help reduce noise, so that work within it can continue round the clock.

Other challenges for the site team include “incredible logistic constraints” of the site, whose footprint means space is at an absolute premium.

Work on the first shaft, with a sprayed concrete lining, is underway.

The other current major activity is pumping grout in to the ground to harden it before tunnelling.

There are relatively few residential premises around the site, but the presence of a Radisson hotel next door means noise has to be kept at a minimum at night.  “We’ve had a lot of contact with the hotel, keeping people informed about what’s going on and we’ve kept very good relations with the local stakeholders. It's been one of the successes of the project," said David Whiteford, Deputy Project Director.

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