Showcasing Surrey Steel Construction Projects
Surrey often conjures up visions of leafy commuter towns, ancient market squares and the rolling North Downs. It’s not, at first glance, a hotbed of steel construction. Steel has, however, been a key part of some of Surrey's most important recent building developments.
Here we take a look at three of the most notable examples.
Walton Bridge: Surrey's Modern Steel Landmark
For the most eye-catching piece of steelwork in the county, look to Walton Bridge, which carries the A244 across the River Thames between Walton-on-Thames and Shepperton.
The bridge is the sixth to stand on the site since the mid-1700s, replacing two life-expired, utilitarian crossings (a 1950s Callender-Hamilton truss bridge and a temporary 1999 structure) with a single elegant span.
Its design comprises two parallel, slender, hexagonal-profile steel arches, painted ivory, forming a thrust arch bridge that spans almost 100 metres across the river without a single pier in the water, preserving both navigation and views along the Thames.
Designed by Atkins and built by Costain, the steel arches were fabricated and craned into position over the soft alluvial floodplain of Cowey Sale before the concrete deck was poured around them. Notably, the bridge won the ‘best practice’ award in the British Construction Industry Awards.
RHS Hilltop, Wisley: A Modern Steel Marvel
For a more recent example of Surrey steel construction, we’ll next take a look at RHS Hilltop at the Royal Horticultural Society's flagship garden in Wisley. Opened in 2021, it's the UK's first dedicated gardening science hub, bringing together laboratories, teaching spaces, and exhibition areas under one roof.
Designed by WilkinsonEyre, the almost 5,000 sq m building takes the form of a Y-shaped plan with two splayed wings connected by a double-height central atrium. Structurally, it's a hybrid: a steel frame paired with reinforced concrete cores and walls for stability, with the steelwork left deliberately exposed inside.
A cantilevered steel-and-glass canopy is used at the main entrance, while a gutter built into the steelwork profile carries water off the building's pitched, standing-seam metal roof. The £30 million project received a commendation in the Structural Steel Design Awards for its central atrium, recognition of how effectively steel was used to knit together two very different wings of the building.
Brooklands Museum's Bellman Hangar: Steel Given a Second Life
Our third Surrey steel success story is that of the Brooklands Museum, which relocated and refurbished its Grade II listed Bellman Hangar to reinstate key surviving elements of the original motor racetrack.
The work involved the addition of steel cladding on the outside and putting in insulation to improve the environmental conditions inside. A new exhibition celebrating the history of aircraft manufacture was created inside the hangar.
The project was described by steelconstruction.info as, “a resounding testament to the flexibility and durability of steel design, both in its original concept and in how it can be sustainably and sympathetically adapted and re-used many years after its original design life has been exceeded.”
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