The Victoria North Project in Manchester

Manchester’s Victoria North Project (previously Northern Gateway) is one of the north of England’s largest-ever urban regeneration projects and will create 5,000 new homes over the next 20 years.

To help clear the former Love Factory site ready for future development, the project’s main contractor, BAM Nuttall, called on S Evans & Sons to demolish the site’s northern and southern warehouses.

The four-week project required careful planning and the use of exclusion zones to deliver it on time and with zero incidents.

Before demolition, the team removed the warehouses’ roof linings, which contained asbestos, using the wet-and-drop method under the supervision of an independent specialist and soft-stripped the structures.

The team deployed two 50-tonne excavators equipped with hydraulic shears and selector grabs to demolish the northern warehouse in a phased approach, reducing each bay before moving on to the next.  The final two bays remained until an exclusion zone was in place and were demolished during a weekend site closure.  The warehouse’s mezzanine floor was cold-cut using a hydraulic shear attachment and a 15-tonne excavator.   Once the floor’s weight was reduced, the steelwork was cold-cut and hinged down to ground level, ready for processing and removal

Demolition of the southern warehouse presented greater complexity and required an exclusion zone to be erected between the site and the busy North Western Rail viaduct. As the neighbouring boundary wall of the warehouse was to be retained, the team cut the roof’s steel columns flush with the boundary wall to protect its structural integrity.

The southern warehouse’s auxiliary structure was mechanically demolished under standard conditions using a typical top-down sequence.   A 50-tonne excavator with hydraulic shears was used to cold-cut the roof into three bays before removing the roof trusses for stockpiling. The remaining purlins and roof trusses were then removed and processed.

Once demolition was complete, the warehouses’ steel columns were hot-cut flush to the ground and removed.

The S Evan & Sons team segregated all waste before removing it from the site for further processing.