Friar Street

A £30m development including a 360 bedroom 15-storey hotel, plus 112 flats on a confined site in Reading town centre

The structures are braced in-situ RC, with the benefits of inherent robustness, fire resistance and good acoustic properties. Due to its complexity the hotel frame was analysed by finite element. The hotel uses tunnel form construction for the repetitive bedrooms, making good use of this system’s speed, accuracy and quality finish. The residential blocks use flat slab construction to optimise headroom and services circulation.

The transition from hotel bedrooms to open public rooms resulted in the need for large transfer beams at several levels. One of the residential blocks features 7.5 metre high Vee columns to support a projecting wing of the building. Due to awkward levels, it was necessary to pump the surface water drainage from the lowest levels. The drainage was integrated into the congested substructure.