het ging niet van een leien dakje maar het resultaat is er.
Hull's year as UK City of Culture may have come to an end, but the legacy of its time in the spotlight shows no sign of abating.
The year-long festival of events and exhibitions attracted an estimated 3.5m people to the Yorkshire city last year and was judged by most observers to have been a roaring success. And now, the most prominent physical example of its legacy is readying itself to open its doors to the public.
Hull Venue is a state-of-the-art music and events complex with of capacity of up to 3,500 people that will allow Hull to attract large corporate conferences, exhibitions and trade shows, as well as major touring concerts, stand-up comedy, family shows and sporting events.
The centre will have the flexibility to reduce to a 2,500-capacity for an all-seated event and a 2,000 sq m exhibition space, as well as an 800-capacity conference auditorium.
According to the city council, it will also deliver 30 full time jobs with 100-150 temporary jobs on event days, as well as an annual £13.5m boost to Hull's economy.
A site of two halves
Main contractor Bam Construction won the £36.5m NEC design and build contract from Hull City Council following a competitive tendering process in December 2015. It has since proved a challenging job.
Firstly, only half of the site was owned by the city council, with the remainder owned by the adjacent Princess Quay shopping centre. As project manager Luke Milner puts it, negotiations over the land “didn't quite go to plan”.
“We were meant to start on site and the council didn't actually own all the land,” Mr Milner recalls.
“We ended up having to reprogramme all the work so we knocked down the council-owned buildings first and started the piling. The land swap [continued to be delayed]. It was just the complexities of the negotiations.”
Series of unfortunate events
The state of the existing buildings on the site was also an issue.
Located close to Hull's main transport interchange, the Hull Venue site was occupied by a series of redundant buildings, including two old pubs and a former ambulance station that had been neglected for years. As a result, extensive works were required before they could even be demolished.
“One of the complexities was that in some of the old buildings there had been fires; in others the roof had collapsed and there had been water ingress over time, so we had to work our way in and do a lot of asbestos surveys,” Mr Milner says.
“There were quite a lot of dead animals that had been living in some buildings and there had been quite a lot of drug use, so we had to do things like needle surveys. We had to make them safe before we could take them down.”
“In some of the old buildings there had been fires; in others the roof had collapsed and there had been water ingress over time”
Luke Milner, Bam
Then there was the small matter of an old car park on the site, which was originally meant to be refurbished. However, when Bam got involved in the project it quickly realised that the issues with the structure were so substantial that it would be more expensive and involve higher risk to refurbish it than it would be to knock it down and start again.
“We looked at it, came up with a design for a new car park, put the business case to the client and they accepted it,” Mr Milner says.
That wasn't the end of the matter, however. It turned out that there was also a Vodaphone mast on the car park's roof – and the process to get it removed would take anything from six to eight months. Bam duly sent off the notification to the company and then set about reprogramming again.
“We had to take half the car park down, which allowed us to get the piling done on the venue and the car park,” Mr Milner says. “Then, once the time elapsed and Vodaphone came and removed the mast, we were able to take down the second half.
“The phasing of the project has been really quite challenging.”
Legacy contract
The upshot of all of this was that both Bam and the council had to accept the idea that Hull Venue wasn't going to open in time for the closing of Hull's UK City of Culture festivities.
However, the client understood the issues involved and was happy that Bam's reprogramming would mean that the venue would open as close to 2017 as possible.
“This was always going to be a legacy project and it still is,” Mr Milner adds.
bam hull venue 20180312 100138
bam hull venue 20180312 100138
Once the site was cleared, the construction of Hull Venue was far more straightforward and since the car park issue was resolved, the completion date hasn't shifted by a single day.
The piling was relatively simple, with the issues identified and addressed early on. “We knew what we were up against and had remediated quite a lot of the ground,” Mr Milner says.
The steel frame “caused a few sleepless nights”, he adds, but ultimately proved unproblematic.