Located on the site of a former 1960s residential block Kennington Park Square square developer, Barratt East London transformed the site into a £42 million contemporary scheme of 114 one- and two-bedroom apartments, providing a mix of private, social and shared ownership accommodation with underground parking and a landscaped,central common area. Thanks to the company’s experience of both tall buildings and residential schemes, and its value engineering expertise, FDS Consult was brought in to develop an innovative fire strategy for the development whilst achieving full approvals.

Because of the size and location of the scheme, Kennington Park Square was subject to both Section 20 (London Building Act) and building regulations approval – the conventional way to approach fulfilling these requirements would have been to install natural vented lobbies throughout the development and sprinklers in the car park, which would have incurred considerable costs and involved sacrificing significant amounts of saleable space. FDS Consult’s expert team applied the company’s creative approach to fire design to remove these costly items from the specification. The team then used its understanding of fire first principles and CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) modelling expertise to justify its innovative approach.