Gareth Acres of John F Hunt Demolition has been given the Considerate Constructors ‘Performance Beyond Compliance’ award for his outstanding orchestration of the demolition at The Copyright Building in Berners Street.
The demolition of the 1957 Richard Seifert designed building and adjoining structure located at the top end of the busy Berners Street in Fitzrovia neighbourhood of the West End of London, was slightly tricky due to the masses of pedestrians and traffic to be considered.
Sited only a few steps away from Oxford Street, fronting onto Berners Street’s one way road and Berners Mews with an arch restriction to the rear, the adjoining and surrounding properties and offices all remained occupied.
The observations made by the Considerate Constructors Scheme’s Monitor on the excellent standard of the John F Hunt Site were praise indeed, and covered the Appearance of the Site, Respect of the Local Community, Environment, Safety, and Value of our Workforce.
It was noted that the site was very well organised at street level with very high quality hoarding around the entire perimeter, with streets and pavements cleaned regularly and works and workforce inside seen as very well organised and most impressive, so site appearance ticked all the boxes.
Our community relations are important to us and we were proud to say that we had no complaints and formed an excellent relationship with our neighbours, receiving compliments by way of a case of beers and further compliments on our section 60 works from City of Westminster, which were especially noted and of which we are most proud.
We aim on all our sites to protect the Environment as much as we can, therefore on Burners Street all arisings were segregated for recycling and the team diverted between 98 and 100% from landfill throughout the various sections of the project which exceeded our Client’s target.
We constantly monitored for vibration, noise and dust which all fell within agreed levels and compiled waste reports and lorry movements which all formed part of our carbon footprint measuring.
Safety is of paramount importance to us and the team operated a fully accredited health & safety management system with visits from our Group H&S Manager every two weeks at which an audit was conducted with the Site Manager.
It was commented upon that this was a very tightly run scheme with an experienced team on site and regular visiting health & safety professionals.
Looking after our workforce was a prime consideration, so ensuring the site management teams were highly qualified in their field and that the demolition team was well trained and receive safety initiatives on a regular basis, was most important.
We ensured the teams’ welfare areas were kept to a very high standard and that our occupational health & lifestyle support was available to all at any time.
We were delighted that the above was noted by the Monitor as being to an excellent level…and even commented on ‘Fruity Friday’!
