Jamestown Manufacturing worked in partnership with Bourne Construction to supply a wide range of size plate girders, weighing up to 15 tonnes each, during the construction of a twelve-storey office building on a prime site in central London.

Twenty Farringdon Street

Close to St. Paul’s Cathedral, in the heart of the historic City of London, 20 Farringdon Street is a 12-storey office building designed by Denton Corker Marshall to replace a smaller commercial property dating from the 1980s. Built to the highest modern standards of sustainability and energy conservation, the new building has six roof terraces on three levels and amenities such as a separate entrance and store for cyclists.

A Thousand Steel Beams

Over a period of ten months, Jamestown Manufacturing delivered a large number of girders ranging in size from 80 kilograms and 500 millimetres long to 18 tonnes and 16 metres long. Technical challenges successfully overcome, using our advanced fabrication technology, included the need for heavy 100 millimetre S355NL butt welds. The steel grades used were S355J2, S355K2 and S355NL plate.

A Confined Site

Inner-city construction sites inevitably pose problems of access and disruption, but the narrow and congested streets of the City of London are particularly challenging in this respect. With little or no on-site storage space, we needed to plan our deliveries carefully to fit in with the construction time-line. Our success in meeting deadlines demonstrates Jamestown’s ability to work closely with our partners, who in this case were Bourne Construction Engineering.

A Modern Office Building

With a double-height reception area and abundant natural light, 20 Farringdon Street has been designed to reflect modern expectations of an office working environment. Staff arriving by bicycle from the adjacent Cycle Superhighway will have their own bike storage (for 142 bicycles) and showering facilities. The stairways have been given prominence and widened to encourage people to use them instead of the lifts. The building is also close to the new Crossrail line, making it quickly accessible from a large part of the Greater London area; one estimate suggests that using Crossrail, a quarter of the United Kingdom population will be within 45 minutes’ travel from this location.