Smoke extract system for Westfield London expansion

Project title: Westfield London

Location: White City, London

Client: E&S Group

Service: Smoke Control

Project Background

Westfield London opened in 2008 giving the local area a new lease of life with the improvement and expansion of a transport hub as well as offering an array of impressive brands.

It offers both leisure and shopping facilities and has seen much investment over the years.

It is currently embarking on a £1 billion expansion project which will add 740,000 sq ft of space to include retail, residential and mixed-use areas. John Lewis will anchor the expansion along with a number other brands.

On its website, Westfield London says: “The precinct’s new shops, homes and businesses will be a valuable addition to the community that lives and works in the White City Opportunity Area. We pride ourselves on creating exciting and innovative places for our customers, neighbours and retailers and this major investment in Westfield London reflects this.”

The Project

The Client

Having already been contracted to provide the smoke systems for the original part of Westfield London, Group SCS was eager to be involved in the expansion. We are pleased to be providing the mechanical smoke extract system, working in partnership with FläktWoods for E&S Group who are delivering an overall solution direct for Westfield.

Our Involvement

As well as the mechanical smoke extract system, we are working on a car park ventilation project at the site using our UniJet system with FläktWoods jet fans. We started work on the project in summer 2016 and are due to finish by summer 2017. The whole site is due to be finished by Christmas this year.

See our smoke vent systems

Our Solution

The Westfield London expansion is a rapidly developing project. As with any shopping centre, there are many phases of development and everything needs to be done within the allocated time. It’s a high pressure project and you have to be sure that your products and system components can be installed quickly and work first time. The site also has restrictions at ground level and below as Transport for London has Underground services running under the site, meaning that you cannot drill there.

With such a challenging programme and deadline presented to us, we decided to opt for a standard off-the-shelf system – the FläktWoods smoke shaft vent system. This modular system is designed as a ‘plug and play’ solution for smoke shaft projects, based around simple selection, simple installation and simple commissioning.

This system is ideal for this type of application as you don’t have much time on site to get work done. It is also perfect as on site there is limited space and time and as with the majority of sites – storage may be an issue. Therefore a system that we had to make on site would not have been ideal. The FläktWoods smoke shaft vent system includes a rooftop fan skid which has already been tested and can be craned in and put into place on the roof ready to be connected.

We are installing smoke shaft systems in areas N2B, N2C, N2E, J1B, J1C and as mentioned previously, the UniJet car park ventilation in the car park.

UniJet car park ventilation system

Standard off-the-shelf FläktWoods smoke shaft ventilation system

A ‘plug and play’ solution for smoke shaft projects, based around simple selection, simple installation and simple commissioning

Curtis Rees, Project Manager at Group SCS:

“Even though it’s a challenging project due to the time frame, I’m pleased to be working with this system as it means we can get on site and get all our works done very quickly and with minimum fuss. This means we can be off site within our allotted time. It’s an efficient way to work and very lean.”