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BAM Plant worked with the crane supplier Ainscough over successive nights to take down 10 office and welfare cabins from a gantry above Gate Street in Holborn.
BAM Construction is preparing to hand over the £25m Africa House office redevelopment scheme in August. As part of the final stage of the project, BAM Plant had to work quickly, quietly and carefully to remove the site cabins in the limited space available.
BAM Plant lifting manager Martin Ross said: “We needed 100m of road to rig the luffing fly jib that would lift the cabins from the gantry. We did this on Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which had to be closed for a weekend along with two side roads.”
The BAM Plant team worked throughout Saturday night to rig the Liebherr LTM 1500-8.1, then handed over to the operator for the removal work. The crane was then de-rigged on Sunday night and the road was opened at 3am Monday.
“We were under time pressure to get the road open, and also environmental controls to keep the noise down,” said Mr Ross. “We also had an eye on the weather as high winds would have meant stopping any lifting works for safety reasons. But we had good weather; we used oak drifts to keep the noise down; and the lifting went smoothly.
“It was a challenging job and it is a credit to all involved that it went to plan.”
BAM Construction project manager Justin Brown added: “Removal of these cabins was critical to the delivery programme for Africa House and was emphasised with our colleagues at BAM Plant from the beginning.
“Restricted access was coupled with the need to negotiate extended working hours due to other restrictions already imposed by both our contract conditions and a voluntary Section 61 agreement with London Borough of Camden’s environmental health team.”
BAM Plant has done several tricky lifts in London recently, including a tight cabin extraction at Great Ormond Street Hospital, a helicopter lift at Waterloo station and installation of a public sculpture at Kings Cross.
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