Concrete room bookings

Despite the recession, the UK hotel industry is continuing to expand with over 11,000 rooms opening in 2009 and a further 40,000 planned to open during 2010 – 2015. Concrete cellular construction looks set to achieve significant share of this active market believes Jenny Burridge, head of structures at The Concrete Centre.

The strength of the hotel sector is underlined by the recent announcement by Travelodge of plans to open 26 new hotels in the UK during 2010 in a construction programme worth £115 million. The expansion will take Travelodge’s UK portfolio to over 400 properties and 30,000 rooms and will include new hotels in London, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Colwyn Bay and Morecambe.

The UK concrete industry has developed a number of cellular construction solutions that are particularly well suited to the hotels. These capitalise on the basic cellular repetitive structure of hotels whilst offer quality and speed of construction.

The cellular solutions include tunnel form, crosswall and twinwall. With tunnel form, a cellular shape is created by on site pouring concrete into moveable ‘tunnel’ shaped formwork. After 24 hours, once the required concrete strength has been achieved, the formwork is removed and moved so that another tunnel can be formed. When a storey has been completed, the process is repeated on the next floor. In this way a strong monolithic structure is quickly constructed.

Crosswall construction uses factory-made precast components that are custom designed and manufactured for each specific project. Load-bearing walls across the building provide the necessary vertical support and lateral stability with longitudinal stability achieved by external wall panels or diaphragm action taking the load to the lift cores or stair shafts. Cellular structures up to 16 storeys have been completed in the UK using crosswall and up to  48 storeys in mainland Europe.

Finally, twinwall construction is a combination of on site and precast concrete. Two thin precast walls and a soffit act as the permanent formwork with concrete poured into the void and also on top thereby forming the cellular structure.

What these three construction methods have in common is fast construction and a high quality finish. In addition they provide, free of charge, built-in fire resistance, sound insulation and robustness. All qualities essential for hotel construction. Further the heavyweight mass of concrete construction provides a high level of thermal mass which can be used to reduce heating and air conditioning requirements.

These benefits together with the speed and buildability of cellular construction will enable the UK hotel industry to cost effectively realise its expansion plans, and ensure a significant concrete market share of one of the few sectors showing growth.

Ref: TCC637