St Bernard’s Gate

The new homes sit across six new blocks and the refurbished Grade II listed North East House. The design also refurbishes St Bernard’s Chapel and the Grade II listed Gatehouse, which dates from 1831, to create community space, a café, and affordable workspace. A strong sense of place is achieved through landscaped public realm interspersed throughout the site, including a tree lined boulevard that runs between the reinstated Gatehouse and the Chapel.

The new build structures range from six to eight storeys in height and utilise reinforced concrete construction; RC flat slabs supported on blade columns with RC core walls around the stair and lift cores. The blade columns were closely coordinated with the architect to be hidden in walls, enabling the spans to be reduced, and slab thickness minimised, resulting in an efficient structural scheme. Detailed structural surveys to the historic buildings allowed for non-intrusive refurbishments, sensitive to their context.

The project included a number of below-ground constraints across the site, such as live gas mains and large service tunnels housing vital infrastructure. This was a particular challenge for the civil engineering design; any drainage and road works had to be mindful of crossing the hospitals critical infrastructure, as well as ensure reliable access routes for buses, ambulances, patients, and staff. Despite this, the adjacent Ealing Hospital remained unimpacted by the development and was operational throughout, due to a carefully considered, phased design, and a high level of coordination.

The surface water runoff from the site was heavily reduced and futureproofed. This was achieved through a combination of permeable paving, green roofs, and below ground attenuation tanks. The network was also designed so it could be built in phases, ensuring the runoff levels remained below the planning requirements, as well as allowing for coordination around existing and proposed services on the constrained site.

Adjustments to the A4020 were made to establish access to the new neighbourhood. This included the introduction of a new right hand turning junction, to enable vehicles to turn into the site through the existing gatehouse on a one way system, as well as updated to the existing junction as part of the S278 works.