The £17.5m housing project led by Blackwood Homes & Care has delivered a mix of 66 homes from two-bed flats to four and five-bedroom homes, using state of the art technology and design features to help people to live as independently as possible in homes in the Charleston area of Dundee.
The homes are spread across nine separate gap sites provided logistical challenges both in design and construction.
Fairhurst provided a multidisciplinary engineering service, associated with the redevelopment of nine sites into assisted living accommodation comprising 50 flats, 16 houses and 3 large SuDS basins.
Surface Water discharge from the development sites required detailed discussion with Scottish Water and Dundee City Council in order to agree on the Surface Water Drainage Strategy. Fairhurst developed a strategy whereby surface water from various areas of the existing road network would be redirected away from currently discharging to the combined sewer network. This required new detention basins to be designed at strategic locations which coincided with an existing culverted watercourse, known as the Lochee Burn, along with flow control devices to control the discharge rate to the equivalent greenfield value. Some of the development sites were too remote from any existing watercourse to facilitate a connection, however with a significant volume of surface water having been removed from the combined sewer network elsewhere, this permitted the remote development sites to discharge the surface water run-off at a controlled rate into the existing combined sewer as a trade-off from removing surface water elsewhere. Full Flood Risk Assessments were undertaken to confirm that the overall strategy produced zero net detriment to the operation of the combined sewer system and zero impact on the Lochee Burn Culvert.
Fairhurst provided structural design services for the superstructure and substructure elements, including SER certification for the project. The design consisted primarily of timber frame construction, with blockwork walls and precast stairs and landings at the flats. The foundations consists of strip and trench fill, with external retaining walls also designed.
