London City Airport

London City Airport is an international airport located adjacent to the Royal Docks in Newham, approximately 7 miles east of central London.  It has a single 1,500 metre runway and operates 120,000 aircraft movements per year.  However, new facilities and infrastructure were required to respond to a predicted increase in passenger numbers and to enable the airport to accommodate new generation aircraft.

Due to the airport’s constrained dockside location, it needed to extend eastwards and reconfigure existing parts of the airport.  As part of these works, Suttle Projects were employed to design a retaining structure and a bespoke fabricated propping system, and to also install the sheet piles to retain a large oil separator tank, a valve chamber and an extensive pre-cast culvert surface water attenuation system.

The project involved working airside, with the runway adjacent to the works during planned and weekend closures. This meant a regime of removal of all plant and equipment to leave an unobstructed flat level surface at runway level between working windows.