Virtual Tour: The River Thames

Traveling along the River Thames from its estuary to the dreaming spires of Oxford highlights a vast collection of Faber Maunsell projects.

On the north shore of the estuary, the journey starts with London Gateway. Faber Maunsell’s divisions, Building, Environment, and Transportation, have been supporting the planning process to redevelop an old oil refinery into Europe’s biggest deep-water port and rail freight distribution center. The company managed one of the largest Environmental Impact Assessments in Europe for the project, which has the potential for 9.5 million square feet of warehousing and distribution facilities and 3.5 million standard container throughputs a year.

Further west at Albert Dock, Faber Maunsell has been providing geotechnical, environmental, and building services for the Royals Business Park, 250,000 square feet of office development with underground car parking.

At Greenwich, you pass the Sainsbury’s Millennium Superstore, for which Faber Maunsell won Building Services Engineer of the Year, and look across to Canary Wharf, a hub of Faber Maunsell activity for commercial and residential engineering. A quick turn of the wheel and we are approaching the first of the River Thames Millennium Piers at the Tate Modern Art Gallery. Faber Maunsell’s Transportation Division helped provide five river piers for the Tate-to-Tate River Boat Ferry Services.

Having cruised past another Faber Maunsell project, Somerset House, one of London’s finest Georgian buildings with a façade as long as the Titanic, we come to our second Millennium Pier, at Westminster. Faber Maunsell has been busy here since the early 1920s, including working on the Houses of Parliament. Westminster Underground Station provided a particular challenge, as the company was charged with designing a new station beneath an existing one while also allowing for uninterrupted service and controlled ground movement to safeguard Big Ben.

Opposite Westminster is the London Eye. From the top, you might catch a glimpse of Faber Maunsell projects such as the Bank of England, for which Faber Maunsell was structural and services engineer in the 1930s, hundreds of commercial office buildings, and PaddingtonCentral office, retail, and leisure development.

Next we come to the recently completed City Inn Hotel, the largest new build hotel project in central London in decades. Faber Maunsell provided a services design that offers high levels of energy efficiency and acoustic control. Faber Maunsell delivered this project from both the Edinburgh and St. Albans offices.

In Westminster and a large part of Central London there has been congestion charging for over a year. Faber Maunsell developed and planned the Transport for London congestion charge scheme, the largest in the world, in addition to designing and supervising associated bus priority measures all over London.

We head to Windsor Castle next, where Faber Maunsell designed building services for more than 100 rooms in the northeast section damaged by a 1992 fire, including several state rooms, three towers, and staff accommodations. Miles of wiring, ducting, and pipework were threaded intricately behind decorations and within the fabric of walls and ceilings.

Just across the river is Maidenhead, where Faber Maunsell’s residential and sustainable credentials are on show. Greenfields is a development built to an Integer (intelligent and green) design. Since the mid 1990s, Faber Maunsell has been involved in this scheme, which uses innovative technology to minimize waste and energy consumption.

Further west are the Reading Wastewater Treatment Works. The brownfield site was fully remediated to provide a new facility to process sewage for the town’s 306,000 residents. Faber Maunsell was part of the design and construct team.

Another major Faber Maunsell environmental contract on the River Thames is the framework agreement with Thames Water to design sewerage systems and water networks, including pumping station reconstruction, flood alleviation schemes, sewer renovation and replacement, and new mains.

Our boat trip finally takes us to Oxford, the oldest English-speaking university in the world. Teaching has existed there in some form since 1096.

In the years since the Second World War, Oxford University has added a major new research capacity. It is to this area that Faber Maunsell has contributed expertise in the last few years with a range of state-of-the-art science and research buildings: a Medical Sciences Teaching Center; a Center for Gene Function; an Information Engineering Building; and Oxford Center for Diabetes for the National Health Service.February marked the opening of the new Oxford University Chemistry Research Laboratory.

To protect its buildings and improve its environment, Faber Maunsell’s Transportation Division has implemented innovative access control measures to restrict vehicles entering the historic centre of Oxford.

We have now finished our tour of the River Thames and taken a peek at just a few of Faber Maunsell’s projects on its banks. Since the company’s merger in 2002, its offices in Middle Street and Hayne street in Central London (147 employees); Redhill in Surrey (29 employees); Beckenham in Kent (159 employees); Witham in Essex (64 employees); and St Albans in Hertfordshire (521 employees) have merged their services.

The company's three divisions are available via each office, but are often delivered by interoffice teams, playing a major part in London’s and the Southeast’s infrastructure, road and rail communications, water supply, and environment.

Contact: bill.o'neill@fabermaunsell.com