Client: Tideway Central
Contractor: Ferrovial Agroman and Laing O’Rourke
Consultant: Robert West
On the banks of the Thames, Tideway have constructed a 120 metre long and weighing 3700 tonne concrete culvert in a temporary cofferdam drydock. It has been floated out at high tide and winched around 100 metres downstream to its final installed position below Blackfriars Bridge. Our hydraulic guide roller will enable it to wheel itself against the current embankment wall. When it reaches its final installed position, the roller will retract like an aircraft undercarriage so that the culvert can be pulled towards the embankment wall, making a flush connection to the existing potentially polluting discharge point.
Further vertical rollers mounted on cushion blocks designed and supplied by us will then guide the culvert downwards with the ebbing tide to its final resting place prepared on the river bed. Once complete, the culvert will link the old sewer to the new tunnel deep under the Thames, and from then it will form an embankment of land reclaimed from the Thames creating a public open space. It will be the first embankment to be built in London on the Thames in a 150 years and will be named the Bazalgette Embankment after the famous engineer who built the capital’s Victorian sewer system.
