Riverside School
A pre-installed Yorkon concrete floor minimised work on site and is providing enhanced acoustics and a high quality, robust finish for a demanding school environment. Our services for this new free school involved setting out the requirements of BB 93. We are providing ongoing input on the acoustic issues associated with design of the building envelope. An extension to the Overground is to pass close to the school in the future and we have provided advice to mitigate the risk of noise from passing trains.
The 23,000sqm Riverside Schools scheme is one of the largest school projects now under construction and will provide additional places for one of the fastest-growing school-age populations in the UK. The campus will have capacity for around 2,700 children from 0-19 – integrating provision for nursery, primary, special needs, secondary, and sixth form.
The Portakabin Group is main contractor for this pioneering project. The contract has been awarded by the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD) via the Council’s local education partnership (LEP), Thames Partnership for Learning. The project is procured by LBBD and funded by the Education Funding Agency (EFA). The architects are Surface to Air and the three free schools on the campus will be operated by the multi-academy trust, Partnership Learning. Sustainable Acoustics are the appointed acousticians, setting out the requirements for BB93.
Constructed using a Yorkon off-site solution for the curriculum areas, the scheme will accommodate a 10-form entry secondary school, a 630-place primary school, a special educational needs (SEN) school, and a nursery. It will also offer extended provision outside school hours and for wider use at weekends and in school holidays to contribute to the local community.
In addition to classroom facilities, the school will boast a sports hall, four floodlit multi-use game areas and a full-sized all-weather playing pitch.
More recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in modular buildings, with a recognition, not only that they can be aesthetically pleasing, but also they can achieve a very high build quality and can be both long lasting and sustainable.
A new fleet of modular buildings has emerged that includes a wide variety of sizes and configurations, with sector specific building types and styles and options for variable plans and multi-storey configurations.
The gap between modular structures and traditional buildings has narrowed, and there has been an improvement in performance driven in part by regulatory standards but also by the availability of new materials.
Read more about the advantages and disadvantages of modular buildings over more traditional forms of construction here.
