Greenwich Peninsula, London

Modern, sleek louvre designs from Colt are the perfect ventilation solution on this architecturally driven project.

The Greenwich Peninsula development is an exciting new residential project situated alongside the Thames. The development design is very architecturally driven and required a very high level of installation precision and product quality from the Colt team to meet the client’s exacting standards.

Working with MACE as the main contractor, Greenwich Peninsula was carried out on London Underground property and required us to provide ventilation and screening louvres to cover up an old, unattractive plant room from the 1970’s which has a lot of fan sets in it; these essential fans are continuously pulling fresh air into the underground area and extracting stagnant, ‘used’ air. This ensures that the underground air remains safe to breathe and also solves for any potential overheating issues that may occur.

Our Colt 1UL louvres were selected by the client for their excellent ventilation qualities and sleek, modern profile which makes them perfect for this project – they allow the plant room to function properly, but provide a much more aesthetically pleasing, public-facing exterior for this stylish, ultra-modern development. Situated alongside the development’s impressive, 5km elevated walkway, the two ventilation turrets Colt installed presented many challenges.

As this project was taking place around and above a functioning and busy tube line, there were a lot of additional health and safety protocols to comply with, which posed some scheduling and install challenges for our project managers and on-site team. An example of the extra safety precautions that we had to consider was to ensure that we were minimising the risk of dropping tools, etc. into the busy track environment below us. As a result of this, the initial works schedule was quite restricted, as we were working outside of ‘normal’ hours and trying to do more work within shorter periods of time. However, because of our experience and expertise, we were able to predict and avoid problems before they occurred and maintain very high work standards whilst meeting our timing deadlines.

Another key consideration on this project was that there was also an existing steelwork frame on site which was being made larger to work with the new designs. Installing new, bespoke louvre around this framework which was also in the process of being worked on added another layer of complexity to this project. To overcome any sizing and install difficulties that could have arisen from this, we cut the louvre to the nearest correct measurements off-site, but left a tolerance to cut it to the exact specifications on site on the day of the install. This added fitting and cutting requirement added extra time pressure, but produced the flushest, highest quality fit – a key requirement on this project and one we wanted to meet.