Willowburn Retail Park

Willowburn Retail Park is a new shopping outlet, which has been created on the outskirts of Alnwick. Phase 1 of the new development was completed in 2020, which included an M&S Foodhall, a Butchers Shop and a Starbucks, with associated car parking etc.

The services provided by Fairhurst on this project included civil, structural and geo-environmental engineering, as well as highways and landscape architecture.

This greenfield site originally had a watercourse running through it, which was a constraint on the development and had to be culverted and re-routed to accommodate the proposed site layout. The new drainage scheme for the site then had to be designed to accommodate the new culvert as well as incorporate permeable paving, rain gardens and a large detention basin as part of the requirements of the LLFA.

Ground conditions weren’t ideal and resulted in a combination of lime stabilisation / ground improvement techniques to accommodate the re-working of the site levels and to provide suitable support for the building foundations and external hardstanding areas.

As well as designing the foundations and super-structure for the new buildings, Fairhurst also designed the site wide retaining walls and offsite highway works to the periphery of the site. This included traffic/pedestrian improvement work such as new cycle lanes, road widening, new bus stops and pedestrian crossings etc, which was all subject to approval by the Local Authority Highways team.

The M&S Foodhall building, which is the anchor retail unit on the site, won multiple awards at the Institution of Structural Engineers (Northern Counties) awards in the categories of best Medium sized project, Most Collaborative project and Most Social Value award. Phase 2 of the development, which is the construction of a new B&M retail store, is now underway.

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