RAINWATER MANAGEMENT
Station Hill regeneration project in Reading, a major development transforming the area around the town’s railway station. Combined with ULMA’s MultiV+ polymer concrete channels, the solution offers durability, high drainage capacity and straightforward installation, giving contractors and merchants a dependable option for modern urban infrastructure projects. BMJ
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www.ulmaarchitectural.com/en-gb/ drainage-channels
CASE STUDY: COOKING UP A STORM
In 2015, plans for a new development in Wantage were approved for over 1,500 homes, all of which would require serious thought about the drainage infrastructure as BMJ found out.
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hase 6 of Vistry’s Kingsgove development in Wantage, Oxfordshire, - 1500 homes, over 100 acres of green space and woodland, a neighbourhood hub, a care home, new primary school and a collection of leisure and entertainment facilities – used Polypipe Civils & Green Urbanisation’s Polystorm, RXL Flow Control Chambers, and 600mm PPIC Inspection Chambers. The inspectability and maintenance of the latter was a key driver in its specification.
“This project was passed to us in the Polypipe CGU Technical Department in August of 2024, when we were asked to run structural calculations and provide a drawing for a Polystorm tank,” Thomas Rankin, associate technical engineer at Polypipe CGU, said. “Over the course of the following months, the project evolved and we were providing the manifold arrangements connecting into the Polystorm tank, orifice chambers and we would also run bespoke structural calculations due to a crane passing over the tanks during construction. After some amendments to the system, an approved drawing – which consisted of seven chambers - was adopted into the engineering consultant’s drawing and sent to manufacturing.”
These chambers, along with PPIC chambers and Polystorm crates, arrived on site from January 2025, ready for installation by the groundworker, Westpoint Construction, whom Matt Bradley, specification sales manager at Polypipe CGU, was in direct contact with – “throughout the entirety of
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this project, there has been consistent communication between all parties. We began this process working directly with Vistry’s project manager, and then progressed into dealing directly with the team at Westpoint to coordinate call offs and so on.
“Overall, the project has gone smoothly and that dialogue is a huge element of that,” Bradley says. “Good communication helps us to ensure that firstly, all parties are on the same page, but it also has a really positive impact on the speed that we’re able to turn things around at.
“In this case, the project team fed back that they were particularly impressed with the collaborative approach to design input and versatility of our product range, and it was a significant contributing factor to the progression of the project – which we are now continuing to supply in the upcoming phases. Our product and quality service has laid the foundations for a great partnership and relationships with both the Vistry and Westpoint teams and this project is a great example of the power of communication and collaboration.”
BMJ
www.buildersmerchantsjournal.net April 2026
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