A tier one contractor has been awarded a £76.5m contract to improve and expand one of Oxford’s student accommodation sites. Morgan Sindall Construction has now completed enabling works at Oxford Brookes University’s Clive Booth Student Village, designed by MICA architects, where it is delivering 515 en-suite rooms and various social spaces across four buildings. The contractor was appointed via the Southern Construction Framework to provide an increased number of high-quality rooms within the University’s estate. With the village located next to the University’s Headington campus and a 20-minute walk from the city centre, it will help to reduce the number of students living in private rented accommodation and support efforts to manage local housing demand.

As part of its Intelligent Solutions approach Morgan Sindall Construction has deployed a number of methods to save time, cost and carbon. These includes a rigid inclusions foundations system which negates the need for pile caps, provides greater flexibility to overcome ground conditions and saves cost and carbon by using less concrete than traditional piling systems. In addition, the team also re- used the demolition waste from the existing buildings on the site to form the hardcore piling mat. For the first time, the contractor employed Giatec, a wireless concrete sensor for temperature and strength monitoring which is cast directly into the concrete. It enables the team to use a mobile app to track when the concrete has cured in real time, whilst giving them the ability to adapt the concrete mix design and meet the programme curing targets. This has meant being able to use less cement and reduce the carbon impact of the frame.