Lawnswood Roundabout

Civcon are the main civils contractor on the signalisation and improvement of Lawnswood roundabout — the junction of the A6120 ring road and A660 Otley Road in North Leeds. Eric Wright hold the main contract under Leeds City Council's Lot 2 intermediate framework, with Leeds City Council as the end client and West Yorkshire Combined Authority funding the scheme.

It's a busy junction. The ring road runs one way, the Otley Road the other, Lawnswood primary school sits nearby, and residential properties line both arms. Before this scheme, crossing the roundabout on foot during peak hours was somewhere between difficult and unsafe. The project aims to signalise the junction, add capacity around the roundabout with additional lanes, and put in proper crossing facilities and a segregated cycle route.

Civcon's scope is the civils package: reduced level dig, carriageway construction to the top of Type 1 sub-base, concrete narrow widening to the underside of binder course, footway and cycleway construction including stone and binder course layers, drainage and attenuation infrastructure, service diversion trenching and ducting. Surfacing, traffic signals, street lighting, lining, and TM are all outside the scope — a call made at tender stage to keep the package focused and the price where it needed to be.

The scheme tendered at £1.7 million over 42 weeks. Completion was programmed for July. It's now forecast for October. That's not a performance issue. Somewhere between 60 and 65 percent of the work delivered to date has been compensation events — changes driven by what was found below ground, which in a lot of cases bore no resemblance to what the pre-works information showed.

The attenuation system is the main drainage element. A 900mm concrete pipe tank with large manholes either side, discharging through a hydra flow control device into the highway drain at an agreed rate — around 3 to 12 litres per second. It exists because Leeds' existing highway drainage is already full. Improvement schemes that bring in more surface water from additional gullies and carriageway can't just let that discharge freely or it floods the system downstream. The tank holds it and meters it out.

Getting that system into the ground was where things unravelled. The attenuation pipework ran straight into uncharted utilities — gas mains and BT ducting sitting where nothing was shown on the drawings. Gas had to be diverted. The BT couldn't move the same way, so the drainage alignment was redesigned and pipe falls flattened to get underneath it. Every clash meant a redesign, reapproval, and programme hit.

The deep manhole construction was its own problem. Manholes at around 5.5 to 6 metres hit rock below 3 metres — not picked up in the ground investigation. With live traffic running overhead, the carriageway had to be supported throughout. Normal piling from the top wasn't possible once the rock was hit, so the method became: pile to 3 metres, lower a machine into the excavation, peck downward from inside to advance the piles. An activity programmed at 7 days ran to nearly four weeks. It got done without touching the live lanes or the traffic management, but it wasn't quick.

Leaking water mains then softened the formation in several areas, requiring increased concrete construction thicknesses and a geogrid system to stabilise the sub-base before it could be built on.

None of these things stopped the work. All of them changed it — and the cumulative effect on programme and cost has been substantial.

The quality of the physical work throughout has been good. Yorkshire Water inspected the drainage and manhole installations and described them as the best they'd ever seen on a scheme. No significant defects recorded.

The working relationship with Eric Wright is in a excellent place. Programme agreements including the Clause 32 programme are now agreed between both parties, which took some work to get to. The project is still live.