Parish Councillors recently visited the Panattoni site to find out about progress with the demolition of the Honda infrastructure. Issues of noise and measures to tackle flood risk now and in the future were also discussed. Read more in this article by Nigel Hole.
On Tuesday 3rd of December Colin and I returned with Barry Thunder to see the progress on the Panattoni site. While we might have had snow last time back in July now there was only Mud and with a capital M, for good reason. Those of you who can picture the massive car plant that was, it’s now gone. Just one small part of a building is left for a temporary shelter, see the photo left below. Jay kindly took us around the site in a pick-up and told us they planned to video when the shelter finally comes down for YouTube. The rest of the site is just mud after storm Bert passed through the previous week.
Last building standing
Loading rocks for crushing
The first stop on our tour was the ‘rock crusher’, see photo above right. For those wincing at that thought, it’s a massive piece of kit that is fed the huge lumps of concrete from the demolition, which it grinds up into aggregate size pieces for reuse in the coming construction. Firstly, for the new road structures and then the buildings themselves. And that’s one of the remarkable elements of this demolition, the effort that’s going into recycling as much waste material as possible. Virtually no rubble has to be carted off-site, reducing lorry use. All the metals have value and get stripped out from the rubble to go for recycling. It was expected that the old runway concrete would be a metre depth to tear through and remove. But as per much of this site, it was over-engineered and there was a depth of two and a half metres. It’s now a mile of aggregate. The tarmac once removed was found to have coal tar as a constituent which is a big no-no in recycling. Though careful lab analysis proved that when used correctly it can be safely reintegrated into the new construction materials.
One of the key things we were looking for with this visit was reassurance that flooding risks were being mitigated both during the demolition/construction phase and into the future of the site. Last time we showed you a photo of a massive concrete culvert with its otter shelf. There’s now a ‘water feature’ going West to East across the site, carefully being sculpted by the diggers while we were there, see the photo below left. It’s the new Kingsdown Brook to join up with South Marston Brook at St. Julian’s. All along its length there are concrete culverts but they’ve been beautifully rendered with Cotswold stonework facing, to take the starkness away, see the photo below right. It will become a meandering stream with grass bank sides, which will be idyllic for workers to sit at breaktimes watching wildlife. And with the cycleway and footpath access across the site being led by the Parish Council, we as a village, will be able to enjoy this pleasant area using access points at Oak Tree Corner, the back of Crown Timber and also from the Keypoint site.
Cotswold stone work
On site water feature
The on-site ‘water feature’ stream see photo above right, has been designed so that normal water flow is just a small channel at the bottom, but in flood conditions, the sides are deep enough to reserve a huge amount of water and the flow rate is designed with a negligible incline to slow egress from the channel in our direction. But before it gets anywhere near the village there are storage ponds to divert it into, to allow a slow controlled release. This isn’t yet all fully in place and operational but there are interim contingency measures. During storm Bert and then two weeks later with storm Darragh, they fired up 6-inch water pumps to take water into the massive storage ponds so that it could be slowly released later. This meant that we didn’t get the inundation we saw with Babette in Oct 2023.
But for this flood protection during the site development, there is a trade-off. A pump that will shift this volume of water away from the village and prevent flooding is not going to be quiet. Some of you might have heard what you thought was a jackhammer going all weekend recently. No, it wasn’t that bad, but it was the pump. We have a choice, flooding or a bit of quiet background noise while a storm passes. I know which the residents of Greenfields, Byron Close or Old Vicarage Lane would prefer!
From demolition, the site is now moving into its reconstruction phase and to reinforce that it’s full steam ahead, the new roads should be going in for the North of the site starting in February. And Winvic who’ve run the demolition are hoping to be constructing one of the first of the new buildings just off the Crematorium roundabout.