Royal Park, Birkdale

The Royal Park project is a £6m development of 22 luxury apartments and three mews houses in Southport. The main pavilion buildings consist of four levels of residential accommodation over basement car parking.  The structure of the buildings is a reinforced concrete frame of columns and flat slabs up to the top floor level with a steel-framed roof.  The frame is clad with masonry cavity walls and slates on profiled metal roofing. The mews houses are three-storey buildings of traditional load-bearing masonry construction with timber upper floors and roof.  The most complicated aspect of the engineering design was to make appropriate allowance for the high water table, both in preventing flotation and in accommodating the reduced bearing capacities of the foundations. We designed the foundations and basement, superstructures, cladding and the associated drainage and hardstandings.