We designed the Section 73 variation that put it right, raising the block by 880 millimetres and re-working the frontage so the retail entrances still met the street. Nottingham City Council granted it in August 2023.
The full story
Elevate came to us holding a permission and not much else. The consent had been won for the site by a previous team, and it was a good one: fifty-eight homes and ground-floor retail on a half-hectare of brownfield beside the Trent, in a part of Nottingham that had been waiting for it. What the permission did not carry was the information anyone could build from, and it came with twenty-three conditions, many of them pre-commencement, which meant nothing could start on site until they were discharged.
This was a genuinely difficult site, and the conditions reflected it. The parcel sits in Flood Zone 3 on the River Trent floodplain, so finished floor levels had to be set no lower than 25.35 metres above ordnance datum, with 600 millimetres of freeboard over a one-in-a-hundred-year event plus thirty per cent for climate change. As a former dairy depot it carried contamination in the ground and the groundwater: lead, asbestos and a hot-spot of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the soils, with hydrocarbons and solvents in the water beneath, and a controlled-waters risk assessed as moderate to high. The made ground was too weak to build on conventionally, so the structure had to reach through it. And the homes sit between two football grounds, one across Meadow Lane and one across the river, on a road that carries heavy traffic, so the glazing and the ventilation had to hit strict internal noise levels.
Then there was the problem buried in the approved drawings. The consented finished floor level to the Meadow Lane frontage was 24.470 metres. The flood requirement was 25.350. The two numbers did not reconcile, and a scheme cannot be built to a level its own flood condition forbids. Found late, that becomes a stopped site and a renegotiated programme. Found early, it is a variation.
We produced the full technical package first: the Stage 4 drawings, an NBS specification and enhanced construction details, issued for tender in September 2021, with the specialist trades coordinated around it. Structural steel, mechanical and electrical services, lifts, partitions, the recessed glazed balconies, the cavity barriers and the roofing all had to be resolved against one another rather than delivered as a set of parts, because a contractor prices the gaps between packages as risk.
Alongside it we worked through the conditions. Across 2021 to 2023 we prepared and secured the approvals that cleared effectively the whole set: construction traffic management, the remediation strategy, noise, piling, materials and brick samples, electric-vehicle charging, landscaping, boundary treatments, and at the end the two verification conditions that confirm the remediation and the sound insulation were actually carried out. We were the named agent on those applications, and we held a live tracker throughout so Elevate always knew what was outstanding and whose it was.
The level was resolved through a Section 73 variation, and we designed it. Raising the block by 880 millimetres is straightforward in principle and awkward in practice: the ground floor lifts above the pavement, so the retail units and the residential entrance stop meeting the street. The answer was a brick-faced retaining wall with steel railings, steps and a ramp holding the Meadow Lane edge, the shopfronts and banding re-set to the new level, a new external substation and access road accommodated, and the parking rationalised around it. The council granted the variation in August 2023, and the last verification conditions were signed off that October.
Then we stayed with it. Under the single-stage design and build we were the architect through construction and handover, answering the queries a live site throws up and reviewing the contractor's information against the approved design, until the homes were finished and handed over. Holding the same practice from technical design to handover meant the detail was held by the people who drew it, with no gap at the point delivery is most exposed.
