Two buildings, one thing in common. They're both being demolished from the bottom up. You see The Leadenhall Building (left) and 20 Fenchurch Street (right) are both top-hung buildings. Top-hung? Sounds interesting, but what is it? Well, imagine the central core of the building as the shaft of an umbrella and the roof as the canopy (now it gets weird) from which cables hang to support the floorplates bellow and you'll have some idea. Now all this is great for producing nice big uncluttered floorspaces but not so good when you have to demolish the building. Because each cable is under such enormous tension, blowing up the building is out of the question as is demolishing it from the top down, because once the roof goes, so does everything else. So the only option is bottom up demolition.
May 2008 Archives
The Health and Safety Executive has recently extended the distance housing developments need to be from major fuel holders to 150 metres, it used to be 100 metres. Cadenza is looking to build a scheme by the Oval, just 18 metres from the gasometer.
If you're a cricket fan you may be interested to know the batsmen would be touch and go according to the HSE, those in the south west area of the ground should be fine, but those to the north east should be looking over their shoulders.
Probably not worth losing too much sleep over though, it's been estimated the odds of the gasometer exploding are 1 in 5 million. According to Totalbet that's 5000 times less likely than Scotland winning the last cricket world cup.
