33 Central, rooftop garden

Urban Street Designs worked with HB Reavi and Kings Landscapes to create a quarter acre stunning roof Garden on the corner of London Bridge. Project reference 33 Central London, we worked on a variety of steel components products and systems.

USD developed, manufactured and installed a retaining housing to cover a building maintenance track at 150 metres long. The objective was to enclose the track and allow the landscape levels to be raised. The main design criteria was for the building maintenance unit housing to act as a retaining edge, and also create a return inner edge, for grating panels to sit on. Making it pedestrian safe and allowing the entire roof to be used as a garden. This involved not only developing the section design but also mapping out the housing on plan and splitting it into manageable steel panels for shipping and installing. Our in house power rollers created the curves to exact radiuses, our angle roller also mimicked those radiuses and our skilled fabricators welded everything together to create the approved design.

We also produced within the project 250 metres of stainless steel flexible edging drainage system. This allowed the Landscape team to set out the sweeping curves and act as a divider between paved, lawned and decking areas.

Urban Street Designs also took up the challenge of developing, manufacturing and installing a 3.5mtr x 5mtr steel Fascia for a living wall in a stairwell. This was a challenging part of the project as the design brief was for the front to be completely free of fixings, and the space the living wall was sat in left us very little room for access around the sides. Using our in house press brakes we developed our own bespoke hook and eye style bracket system, we bent up the steel fascia to the desired size and our fabricators welded everything into position ready for a quick and easy installation without any on-site welding required.

Urban Street Designs developed and manufactured a number of different steel bollards and boxes to be used on the roof garden, all in a powder-coated finish and protected with a primer: Water Point Bollard – This involved developing flush finishing doors on both sides of the bollard while still keeping the hinge hidden. Also included were security locks and removable internal bracketry for fixing and maintenance of equipment. Emergency Break Glass Bollard – This required a cut out and recessed internal box, fully fabricated and dressed back, for a break glass unit to be fitted. Emergency Speaker Stand – This simple box unit was manufactured so it could be recessed into the ground with fixings positions for a speaker to be stood on top, while all the wiring could be contained underneath. Power Point box – This large steel box was given a bespoke internal hidden hinge system which was designed by Urban Street Designs to carry the weight of the door and still make no visual impact on the box when it was shut. Gasket was used on the lid to create an IP65 seal once closed and removable internal bracketry for fixing and maintenance were included.

During the final installation for the soft landscaping the main contractors on site hit a problem, were paving had to be installed up to the facade of the building, a void had to be left for building purposes. Urban Street Designs were asked to come up with a design to carry paving slabs and manufacture a steel fascia which could be fixed to the supports for the paving and not require any mechanical fixings to the actual facade of the building. Due to uneven ground surfaces we had to create a sturdy platform that had 100mm adjustment in height and 200mm of adjustment in length; this was sketched up and designed during a site visit. This product really shows off our creativity and expertise which can be utilised for on the job designing and problem solving.