Alder Hey in the Park, Liverpool

Project Background

Alder Hey Children’s Hospital was founded in 1914. It is a major national children’s hospital and NHS Foundation Trust. Located in a suburb of Liverpool, it provides care to over 270,000 young people and their families every year. This makes it one of the busiest children’s hospitals in Europe.

Having outgrown their existing building, construction began on 26 March 2013 for a new Alder Hey hospital in the neighbouring Springfield Park.

This flagship project is the first children’s hospital in Europe to be built in a park. Aptly named ‘Alder Hey in the Park’, its design was inspired by children.

The new hospital will open in summer 2015. The original Alder Hey hospital building will be demolished and the land redeveloped to provide new parkland for the local community.

 

Project Scope

Tenos were required to provide a fire engineering strategy and design for the new hospital ensuring statutory approval was achieved at design stage.

 

Tenos Solution

Project-led by John Barnfield who has extensive healthcare experience, Tenos were able to provide a team with first-hand experience and expertise in providing fire engineering solutions for innovative and complex buildings. Tenos worked closely with the design team to deliver a cost-effective fire safety engineering solution to support an architecturally unique concept.

As part of the process on behalf of the client during the design stage, we pro-actively negotiated with the relevant approval authorities to achieve early statutory approval.

Burntwood School, London

Project Background

Allford Hall Monaghan Morris (AHMM) architects were appointed to refurbish Burntwood School in south-west London, a 1950’s modernist education campus for 2000 pupils and 200 staff.

Six new buildings were created including four 4-storey teaching pavilions, a new sports hall and a new performing arts centre all placed amongst a number of retained buildings to form a complete and coherent campus.

In 2015, AHMM were awarded a RIBA Stirling Prize for this project.

 

Project Scope

Tenos was appointed by the project contractors Lend Lease to develop the fire strategy for the new and refurbished school and to negotiate design approval with the statutory authorities.

 

Tenos Solution

The fire strategy included the development of fire engineering solutions to justify a number of variations from standard guidance. This ensured the proposed architectural aspirations of the client could be realised including voids and double height spaces within the building to increase natural daylight and make connections to the exterior. Tenos fire engineers were able to successfully negotiate design approval with the necessary statutory authorities.

Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Authority (GMWDA)

Project Background

The Greater Manchester Waste Disposal Authority (GMWDA) is the largest waste disposal authority in England. It is responsible for the management and disposal of municipal waste from the Greater Manchester area.

Following the signing of a 25 year Private Finance Initiative (PFI) contract in 2009 for waste and recycling, the GMWDA proceeded with the construction of 38 new recycling and waste management facilities across 24 sites. This included state-of-the-art facilities such as anaerobic digestion (for the biological treatment of organic waste and production of fuel gas), in vessel composting and materials recovery.

The final facility was completed in April 2013.

 

Project Scope

Tenos was appointed by the main contractor Costain to develop a fire safety engineering strategy for the new Mechanical and Biological Treatment (MBT) facility.

 

Solution

The new Mechanical and Biological Treatment facility comprises of high-value bespoke processing plant and control equipment.

In terms of life safety, satisfying fire safety legal requirements at recycling and waste management sites is relatively straight forward. However, statistically, fires as such facilities are quite frequent.

Therefore, in addition to life safety consideration, GMWDA were required by their insurers to implement a fire safety strategy to protect assets at the MBT facility for business continuity purposes.

Tenos used a risk-based approach for this project which involved an assessment of the performance of existing fire protection systems. We developed a cost-effective fire safety engineering strategy for life safety and the protection of assets and provided consultation throughout the construction phase.

We also produced detailed specifications for fire detection and alarm systems, passive fire protection, automatic fire suppression, and cause and effect for plant control in the event of a fire.

The implemented fire safety engineering strategy ensured our client’s building construction and control systems fully complied with their legal obligations and satisfied the requirements of insurers.