Kelham Island is renown for its industrial heritage and as Digimaps highlights below during the 1900s the site was used as an engineering works which would suggest that there will be contaminated land underneath the existing building. Once the existing structure is demolished then soil testing will be carried out to determine if the ground is contaminated or not, if so then this will have to be removed in order for the proposed structure to be structurally sound once built.

This project will utilise pile foundations to support the load of the building, these will be installed using the continuous flight auger (CFA) method, where steel reinforcement is used to allow for the pile to resist shear forces. This is a much faster method as the piles are drilled and poured in a continuous operation.

During the process CFA piles are constructed by a rotating stem that is drilled into the ground until reaching the desired depth as the picture to the left demonstrates. Next the concrete mix is then poured into the freshly drilled hole whilst making sure static head pressure is maintained. Once the concrete is poured the steel reinforcement cage can then be put into place in the wet concrete, which when dry will provide further structural safety to the foundations by stopping any punching shear force from breaking the concrete.

This method will be more beneficial when developing in the Kelham Island area as less vibrations are created which means that there is less disturbance to the surrounding areas.