28th February 2018

Thomasons reappointed by Retirement Villages for Bury Water Lane development

Thomasons has won its second major commission for Retirement Villages (RV), one of the UK’s most respected developers of purpose built, retirement communities.

The practice has been providing civil and structural engineering services to RV for over seven years, and has now been asked to provide services and expertise for the new Bury Water Lane development in Saffron Walden, Essex.

This follows our engineers’ work on RV’s award-winning Charters Village development in East Grinstead, which was a key influencer behind their decision to reappoint Thomasons for this project.

Thomasons has already been working on this particular project for two years, initially providing RV with due diligence advice to develop the site’s design and assist the planners to obtain planning permission.

A challenging site, Bury Water Lane is set on a relatively steep hill which required some of the buildings to be split level divided (at the changes in level) with retaining walls.

Furthermore, Retirement Villages has a particular clientele whose needs should be carefully considered and catered for within the layout of the site. Having worked on similar projects before, this is something Thomasons is acutely aware of. Our expertise influenced the final recommendations for Bury Water Lane’s design.

For example, the site needed to be ‘wheelchair friendly’ so that all residents are able to move around freely with minimal constraints. This required provision of ground retention structures in a number of areas of different forms to split the site into flat plateaus enabling good access and free movement of residents.

The project’s building phase started in February 2018 with contractors Castleoak and is set to complete in early 2020.