Joint utility work at UCLan
Joint utility work at UCLan
In January 2018, Preston City Council granted planning permission for the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan) to transform their Preston campus through a £200 million campus masterplan development.
UCLan’s vision over the next five years is to create a unified, sustainable and welcoming campus that draws together the university with the city like never before. The new campus will include a student centre, engineering innovation centre, social space and large square designed for hosting events around the Adelphi Quarter. This new ‘shared space’ will change the priority of roads within the Adelphi roundabouts.
The Adelphi Roundabout as it looks today
How the new public square will look
As a result of this expansion, UCLan approached Electricity North West to divert our 33kv oil assisted cables below the roundabout to allow access for maintenance works. These diversions were seen as programme critical to the student centre and new square project.
Working alongside UCLan and Lancashire County Council, we proposed installing all utility apparatus beneath the Adelphi roundabout at the same time to allow future works to take place and keep traffic disruptions to a minimum.
David Green, diversions project manager for Electricity North West, said: “During initial meetings with UCLan and their design team, it became apparent that the route of our diversion coincided with the route of a number of other utilities diversions including BT, gas and some smaller telecommunications companies. We decided that it would be beneficial for everyone for us to undertake all the excavation and duct installation work for the other utilities”.
Excalon, our principal contractor carrying out diversion work
The benefits of carrying out multi utility trenches include:
- Improved programme durations for UCLan
- Reduced disruption to traffic and pedestrians
- Potential cost savings to UCLan
- The ability to determine where our assets are installed and how much space lies around our cables minimising potential damage.
From Left to right: Des Donnelly (Excalon) Jayson Schmidt (Excalon), Dave Smith (UCLan), Mark Williamson (ENWL), David Green (ENWL).
In September 2018 director of energy solutions, Mark Williamson met onsite at the Adelphi roundabout with the director of UCLan, Dave Smith, who was absolutely delighted with the work we have carried out so far. Mark said “Dave Smith recognises that the development at the university is likely to cause some disruption to the centre of Preston and is delighted that we have helped manage this to an absolute minimum. UCLan have been impressed by us and our principal contractor Excalon, and the manner in which these works have been managed to date. He was very impressed that we were able to carry out joint utility trenching and was keen to learn more about the benefits that this brings. It’s a real credit to David Green and his team who have planned this job meticulously and have made it such a successful project and we are confident that this outcome will be replicated on more multi utility schemes in the future.”