Red Rock have been geotechnical consultants for the £14m redevelopment of the historic Victorian fort of Fort Bovisand lying on the eastern approaches to Plymouth Sound.
The redevelopment of the fort into luxury accommodation with commercial outlets requires new multi-storey buildings built into the hillside. These 20m high slopes will be cut into overburden soils of quarry waste and peri-glacial head, with rock outcrops towards the base. Following extensive ground investigations and drone lidar surveys of the slopes, our propriety in house software including GEO5 and SlopeW, supplemented with in house calculation spreadsheets, enabled a full Eurocode soil nail and rock anchor designs to be produced.
Outline designs produced for costing purposes are being updated to detailed designs for construction.
These challenging cut slopes are superseded by the design and stabilisation works required to maintain the only access to the fort along a coastal road. That road is, in places, a few metres from near vertical 15m high soil sea cliffs.
Following an erosion assessment of the cliffs to establish expected cliff performance in the short, medium and longer term according to expected sea level rise predictions, areas were selected where works were required and stabilisation designs produced.
