Marylebone Square

This large development occupies the site of a former car park just behind Marylebone High Street. The five storey building provides mixed use, with retail on the ground floor and residential, including affordable housing, above and is arranged around a central courtyard. In all the block will provide 79 apartments, retail, restaurants and community facilities at ground level to all four streets, a basement public carpark and a new home for the weekly Marylebone Farmers Market. English Heritage commented, “The architects have responded imaginatively to all the different constraints of the site, producing a design that will genuinely enhance the character and appearance of the area.”

The building which is 100m x 33m is split into five blocks all clad in a total of 10,000 faience units with a creamy coloured glaze exhibiting slight variations across each block. The faience, manufactured by Boston Valley Terracotta, has been produced using extrusion the flat elements, string coursing, window jams and headers. The corner pieces to the windows and the curved elements on the corner of the block are all hand pressed pieces.

We were also contracted to design, supply and install the SFS backing structure to our works along with insulation, cavity trays and fire barriers. The faience is installed as traditional handset in accordance with the masonry code BS 8298. Vertical load is taken at each floor level using corbel brackets the remaining pieces are all restrained back to the SFS behind.

Due to the amount of fixing brackets required for the Juliet balconies it was not possible to individually fix the window headers in these areas. It was necessary to post tension the individual faience elements together and lift them into place as a single unit. Two 16mm diameter stainless steel rods were threaded through the five individual faience elements to fix them together and the ends stressed and locked off on site using jacks. They were then filled with concrete and were able to be lifted into place as a single unit with just small restraint connections holding them back and to prevent any rotation ie they have no loadbearing fixings behind them. To our knowledge post tensioning of faience elements in this way has not been done before in the UK.