Case study - paving the way for culture
The Council’s Highways Adoption team have been hard at work managing a key project to deliver a key new car park scheme in the city.
The London Road/Charterhouse project forms part of an overall masterplan, The Sherbourne Loop, a multi-million-pound project led by Complex Development Projects (CDP), to create and redevelop historical links between The Charterhouse Monastery and the adjacent London Road Cemetery and River Sherbourne.
The £400k project which initially centres on links between London Road and historic Charterhouse Monastery, will bring a massive improvement not only for accessing the magnificent 13th Century Charterhouse building itself, but also through delivering much-needed increased car parking capacity, improvements to the landscape as well as improving the overall vehicle and pedestrian access. Such a project provides another excellent example of how Coventry City Council is a specialist in executing Highway works including those required under Sections 278 and 30 of the Highways Act.
Neil Cowper, Head of Highways at Coventry City Council said:
“This project is a great example of how the Council can work alongside partners and developers in delivering large complex infrastructure works such as this through managing partnerships and cost-effective solutions.
“This brings big benefits in that we can provide one point of contact for the project, reduces the need to engage a separate contractor to work on site and improve overall project delivery.
“We use our own labour or call off contractors from a market tendered framework, providing assurance that developers are achieving value for money from scale far greater than their own project and avoiding the need for further procurement and tendering, thus saving money and time. “The fact that the scheme will ultimately deliver major improvements and increase access to the site, which in turn will hopefully increase footfall initially to Charterhouse, is doubly pleasing. Quality is always of greatest importance to our team – this is our City and we take pride in delivering projects that fit our future vision as we continue our build-up to our year as UK City of Culture in 2021.”
The Charterhouse car park project is a prime example of how Coventry City Council has the right engineering skills suited to executing works required of developers under certain sections of the Highways Act, namely Section 278 and Section 30. By carrying out the highway works directly, the Council can adopt the highway immediately on completion, thereby cutting down any defects or maintenance liability period and delivering completion earlier.