Capital East, Royal Victoria Dock

Capital East at Royal Victoria Dock was awarded ‘Best London Development’ by the Daily Mail UK Property Awards, ‘Best Apartment’ and ‘Best Interior Layout’ by the What House Awards, and was shortlisted for the 2006 Housing Design Awards. Two listed cranes on the dockside are preserved to reflect the site’s industrial heritage. The 5 new buildings of 10 and 18 stories were designed by renowned architects Squire and Partners to complement the challenge presented by the proximity of these superb examples of engineering.

The basement car parking on two levels is designed as a sheet-piled box containing piled column foundations, arranged to miss the 19^th Century wrought iron tie anchors behind the dock wall. The dockside elevations are built over the water on large diameter steel piles passing through the suspended deck of the dockside crane runway. These piles were some of the largest in the UK at 46m and 1250mm in diameter. The buildings are arranged around a podium courtyard on a transfer slab above the car park. Above the transfer slab each building is framed with insitu high-strength concrete columns and shear walls proportioned to fit within dry-wall party walls. Upper floors are insitu flat slabs without drops to achieve economy in the overall building heights. The duplex penthouse floor and roof slabs are supported on concrete-filled slender circular steel columns set back from the fully glazed external walls, providing uninterrupted views of Docklands, Canary Wharf and the O2 Dome.