AFTER less than five months on site, the York-based Portakabin Group has handed over a £2 million, four-storey scheme for office support staff at the University Hospital Southampton.

The new building was required to provide purposed-designed, permanent business support offices and meeting space for about 85 staff from the medical physics and dietetics teams who were relocating from outdated facilities.

That accommodation could then be demolished to allow construction work to start on a new seven-storey car park. The upper two floors of the office scheme will provide additional space for the trust’s future expansion without any further impact on the hospital site.

Portakabin was appointed as design-and-build contractor for the project, and manufactured the 1,300 square metre facility offsite in York using a Yorkon solution.

The site is in the centre of the hospital and was extremely constrained, fronting a busy road and next to a number of clinical buildings. Fast completion was essential so work could be started on the car park development as soon as possible.

Portakabin had to undertake complex logistics and meticulous planning throughout to manage traffic flows and maintain access at all times for bus and ambulance routes and for around 800 deliveries each day along the road immediately adjacent to the site.

Because of the severely restricted working area, the Yorkon building modules were craned into position about 70 per cent fitted out, with partitions, plumbing and electrics pre-installed.

Neil Haskell, senior project manager at the hospital trust, said: “The restricted time to build this scheme was the key driver for modular construction.

“Site-based building methods could not have delivered the building in the timeframe we had, and were not feasible on such a tight site.

“The space for the new facility was extremely limited and so lent itself well to moving as much of the construction into the factory as possible.”

“The use of a Yorkon solution also resulted in much less disruption because most of the fitting out was done off site and we were able to maintain access 24/7.”