Tideway's time capsule
15.03.21On Friday 5th March, our team at Tideway’s Blackfriars site completed the excavation of its shaft – the last of nine on the Central contract, which will stop sewage overflowing into the capital’s river.
This shaft will take sewage discharges intercepted from Joseph Bazalgette’s overworked Victorian sewer system and direct them to our main tunnel deep beneath the bed of the Thames. Before the team pours the base slab (essentially the ‘floor’ of the shaft), they buried a time capsule, detailing the project, its engineering, the wide array of people working on it, and some physical mementos of our time.
The capsule, put together by a team of graduates from across the Laing O’Rourke and Ferrovial Construction joint venture delivering the Central section of Tideway, contains an A3 presentation folder which details the project, its purpose and legacy, including accounts of how we managed to continue work through the pandemic. The team also included maps and photos of all eight construction sites from the Central section of the Tideway project, a water sample from the Thames, a Tideway hard hat, a COVID-19 mask, a smart phone, hand tools and a cube of concrete.
Viv Jones, our Project Director on Tideway, said: “It’s been a turbulent and uncertain year for everybody, but our teams across the project have made fantastic progress despite this. It’s pertinent that we’re commemorating the bottoming out of the contract’s ninth and final shaft with this time capsule given the historical significance of the time we’re living in. We’re building this infrastructure to last well into the next century and hope future generations appreciate our engineering in the same way we appreciate Bazalgette’s 150 years on.”