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© Laing O'Rourke It chose this option, rather than try to build on an entirely
new site, because it was already in NHS ownership and had out- line planning consent for development. Not only that, Pembury was the only major site earmarked for
© Laing O'Rourke The two companies do work together often, though, and
Laing O’Rourke was chosen to build the new hospital. A PFI project board, set up as a sub-group of the trust board,
oversaw the project supported by specialist project groups for different aspects of healthcare. As it originally stood, Pembury’s buildings occupied half of a
site outside Tunbridge Wells, while the other half of the site comprised an assortment of temporary buildings that had mush- roomed as the hospital expanded haphazardly. The trust decided to clear the temporary buildings and construct the new seven- storey hospital on that half of the site, before demolishing the old hospital.
development in Tunbridge Wells’ District Council’s plan, and so seeking any alternative location would have involved a costly delay while the trust sought to persuade the council to revise its plan and then grant permission, and all the while patients would have been languishing in the old hospitals. Hence there was not much choice of where to build, and fortunately Pembury was a site that presented no technical construction problems. Steve Watkins, commercial leader for Laing O’Rourke’s
Crown House Technologies South, found the sort of site builders like to find – flat, self-contained and with no unusual ground conditions or other unpleasant surprises, “almost a bit boring as a site,” he says. The hospital was built with a part-tension in-situ frame, with
precast columns and using a retaining wall. Modular building components were then installed, manufac-
tured in Crown House’s Wolverhampton factory and brought to the site. The advantage of using ready-to-install components, Watkins says, is that “in a day you can do what would be three weeks site work, which is important because under PFI there are
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