BBES starts work on redevelopment of Sea Containers House
Balfour Beatty Engineering Services has started work on a £30 million contract for the design and installation of M&E services as part of the refurbishment of Sea Containers House, the second-largest building on the south bank of the River Thames in London.
The project involves 13 floors of existing office space being converted into a 360-bedroom hotel and the construction of a 9-storey extension.
Innovative approaches to the project include creating a full-scale services mock-up to show the design approach prior to construction commencing and using offsite prefabrication to reduce local environment impact and ensure safer working conditions.
A key challenge of the project has been to design M&E services that can be retro-fitted into the restricted slab-to-slab height of this 1970s building. The mock-up showed how this could be achieved with a well designed and modularised heating, ventilation and lighting system.
Other aspects of the project include the design, supply and installation of new central-heating plant and connections, the installation of two new medium-voltage distribution panel boards, four 11 kV package sub-stations and a 2 MVA generator set.
