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Battle of Britain Monument, Victoria Embankment, London

This monument commemorating the Battle of Britain was unveiled by HRH the Prince of Wales and HRH the Duchess of Cornwall on 18th September 2005 on the 65th anniversary of the Battle of Britain. Bronze plaques listing the names of all the pilots and aircrew, which flew in the Battle, are mounted on a granite edifice.

The original monument comprised a stone edifice that was approximately 25m long x 2.2m wide x 2.4m high with the long sides parallel to the river Thames. One of the flank walls of the monument sits on the back edge of the massive river wall and the other is supported by the piers between the arches to an old ventilation chamber of the underground railway tunnel, which runs under the road. The Architects (Donald Insall Associates) exploited the length of the monument and remodelled it by cutting a diagonal walk way through the structure. This resulted in two pointed structures offering additional wall surface area for display.

The monument is capped with a reinforced concrete slab supporting stone slabs. Lateral stability to the walls is provided by internal concrete frames. One of the interesting engineering problems was the design of the foundations for the two new diagonal walls and the columns of the stability frames. This was achieved by spanning reinforced concrete ground beams between the piers to the existing ventilation chamber and the river wall.

The monument, which is Listed Grade II received a Civic Trust Award from Westminster City Council.

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Royal Geographical Society

This project won ‘The judges special award’ at the British Construction Industry Awards (BCIA) in 2005. “The BCIA is the UK ’s premier building and civil engineering awards and the object of the awards is to recognize excellence in the overall design, construction and delivery of building and civil engineering projects.”

The Judges special award is “for a building or civil engineering project of any size which the judges consider to be particularly inspirational in one or more aspects”.

The project was procured under a ‘design & build’ contract. ARUP prepared the employers requirements on behalf of the client and CSP were Civil and Structural Engineers for the contractors proposals, successfully winning the bid for Durkan Pudelek.

The project was a semi-basement archive store and visitors centre at the RGS headquarters in South Kensington . This was to house the national archives of the RGS within a climate-controlled environment and provide a visitors centre / exhibition centre allowing access to these valuable documents by the general public.

Project value: £4.5million

Architect: StudioDowne

Main Contractor : Durkan Pudelek