Cartwright Gardens is a major redevelopment project in the prestigious Bloomsbury Conservation Area of Central London delivering 954 modern student rooms in partnership with The University of London (UoL). Through the refurbishment of intercollegiate accommodation, the outstanding new scheme combines high quality architectural design with extensive social facilities and public access to newly redesigned gardens.
The key challenge on this project was that the new design included keeping the existing building slab and sub structure. This presented a design problem as the site overlays part of the London Underground network producing disturbing vibrations that would require uniform deflection. The south end of the building is built over Piccadilly Underground rail line with a third of the building requiring acoustic isolation. Proximity to the underground tunnel and problems with the soil strata below required a 500-650mm reinforced concrete raft- slab as the foundation design for the new building.