Birmingham City Council

Overview:

The 'Birmingham Concrete Block project' as it is known is a large scale refurbishment of non-traditional and traditional houses in Birmingham over a five year programme. Birmingham City Council have 68,000 properties, 12,000 of which are of non-traditional construction encompassing 40 different building types, 240 properties of which are high rise. Birmingham have a framework agreement in place to carry out this large scale refurbishment, of which Structherm are providing external refurbishment solutions.

Details:

Structherm have applied structural cladding and insulated render to around 1000 properties so far with more in the pipeline. The areas of operation are: Small Heath, Ley Hill, Brooke Vale and Yardley Wood.

Solution:

Most of the properties are of a Concrete Block Cavity Wall type construction which required structural cladding to make them structurally sound. The benefit of using Structherm’s structural cladding for this purpose is that there is no need to decant the tenants, which on a project of this size would be a huge undertaking.

There were also a number of Wimpey No Fines properties which had all the problems associated with this type of post war construction such as:
 

• Lack of energy efficiency
• Condensation and mould
• Poor thermal performance

These have now been given a new lease of life with the application of the Structherm external wall insulation.