road plate hire

With the association of the famous Ferrari brand, we expect performance and passion in spades. This project, working with international construction and design contractors extraordinaire Sice Previt, certainly didn’t disappoint!

It had the full range of challenges:

• A set of four bespoke, irregular and curved steel structural staircase elements – up to 8 metres long and 6 tonnes in weight per section – to be threaded through a fragile and historic shop window aperture, barely large enough to accept them.

• A compressed time frame. When we were contacted just before Christmas, these stairs were being handcrafted in Italy. The actual units didn’t arrive at our works for us to lay eyes on them until the afternoon of the first of the five consecutive dates of night time delivery slots.

• The site – the eagerly awaited new Ferrari store on the infamously busy Piccadilly in central London – was not straightforward. As well as full lane closures with pedestrian and traffic management, it had some sensitive neighbours, including Cartier and DeBeers diamond house. The footway had some challenges. Limited scope for road closures meant the load, crane and rigging geometry had to be perfect. The footway had to be thoroughly prepared for the outrigger loads. We worked with the clients structural engineers and provided mitigation plates to resolve those issues.

• Our AP and lift team, having made several trips to site to check critical details, recognised the need for exemplary preparation and load engineering. This resulted in our decision to completely recreate the street scene. Complete with shop window aperture, street furniture and a full scale wire-frame replica of the trickiest load element. This allowed our operators and four-man lift team to rehearse and refine the lift procedures to fully dimension the required position for all of our trucks and equipment ahead of the limited delivery slots.

• As you can see from the pictures, the transitions were tight. Each night from 22:00 into the small hours, a separate section was delivered and carefully lifted in and handed over to the Italian internal lift team, who took each piece into the three-storey interior void for installation.

After five nights of a collective effort of competence, confidence and understanding – and despite the language barrier – our part in this project was completed. On time and on budget with zero incident.

“The whole Sice team thanks you [Southdown] for the great support you’ve given us these days,” said Pierluigi Bardi, retail project manager and store designer at Sice Previt.

“Your team has been super collaborative and very helpful in all the structure manoeuvres. Hope to collaborate in the UK in the future.”

We wish our new Italian friends every success in completing London and then heading to New York for another similar adventure.

Photos courtesy of Ryan Russel and Wayne McKinder.