Rockwool manufactures high quality insulation products at its factory in south Wales. They acquired 20 acres of land adjacent to the factory to build a logistics centre and warehouse extension, allowing them to increase onsite capacity to store and distribute their products.

Knights Brown was appointed as principal contractor for the fast track project comprising 64,000m2 of concrete hardstanding, a 60m concrete retaining wall, 400m of access road, 126t link bridge, 180m conveyor structure, and 1,200m of FSC accredited, 3m high acoustic and security fencing to the perimeter.

Other elements were:

• Three large swales for surface water drainage, totalling more than 1,000,000 litres of water storage and discharge.
• Structures including a logistics building, security lodge, forklift store, six story south tower, north tower structure and conveyor building.

We took a proactive role throughout, closely advising on numerous aspects.

Rockwool required early control of certain areas of the site so we established a partial handover programme. The initial requirement was for the access road, early concrete hardstanding and the conveyor structure with connectivity between each. A great deal of planning went into the concrete bay sequences and these were important in planning access to areas and partial handovers.

Extensive ecological constraints had a bearing on the timeline and sequencing of works with restrictions on access routes and protected areas.

Throughout we had a substantial input to design aspects to ensure elements had a sufficient level of ‘buildabilty’, one example being our proposal for the redesign of the entire drainage network levels.