Southbank Place, London

Drought Mitigation

SDS Intellistorm® helps new development achieve its sustainable vision.

Overview

Southbank Place is located just across the River Thames from the Palace of Westminster and overlooks Jubilee Gardens. The development includes 49,000m² of office space, spread across 8 buildings, 877 homes and 4,500m² of retail space, plus restaurants and cafes.

This showcase development is intended to reinforce the South Bank’s reputation as the epicentre of culture, design and architecture in London and reflects the customer Braeburn Estates’ hallmark vision of sustainable development.

SDS was tasked with minimising the additional pressure the development will have on London’s water supply and drainage infrastructure, and also on the local environment.

What We Did

The development is required to meet an estimated demand of 100 megalitres of water and to process more than 11 megalitres of surface water, per annum, whilst limiting discharge to the peak flowrate dictated by GLA and Thames Water.

Due to limitations on green infrastructure, and therefore no opportunity to consider the use of swales and soakaways, SuDS options for the site were effectively limited to attenuation of surface water and, due to the sub-basement levels on the build, controlled and pumped discharge to drain.

With space at such a premium, and things tight both practically and financially, basement-level attenuation tanks were installed.

SDS Intellistorm® enables these tanks to be used to collect and store the rainwater on an automated basis.

Results

The tanks create a storage void of more than 1,000m³, sufficient to provide the minimum viable solution using SDS Intellistorm®.

Three systems were installed in phases, starting in early 2018, to coincide with the construction of the new development. All of the systems have now been installed and the attenuation function is in full operation; the reuse function will be introduced in line with the operation of the new buildings.

The entire system is able to harvest up to 15,000m³, or 15 million litres, of water per year.

The London Plan directs that all developments should consider the reuse of rainwater in the design of stormwater drainage. For this project, we wanted to use a large proportion of rainwater to support the site’s air-conditioning cooling tower plant. Intellistorm® ideally suits the Southbank Place project. Most recently, we are now planning to utilise some of the rainwater, supplemented with greywater, with which to irrigate the neighbouring Jubilee Gardens.

– Paul Taylor, Associate Director, AECOM

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