Civic Engineers are appointed as Civil and Structural Engineers on the regeneration of Caernarfon’s historic waterfront buildings. The collection of derelict and partly-collapsed buildings on Slate Quay, known as the Island site sits alongside the World Heritage Site of the Caernarfon Castle and incorporates the Grade II* listed Harbour Masters Office Building.

The site will be refurbished and re-developed to create an artisan quarter, celebrating the site’s manufacturing history through a series of work spaces for small scale artisan design, manufacture and retail occupiers, together with a small number of holiday apartments. The Client is Gwynedd Council and the project cost is circa £4m to be part funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

The site, located on the quay side of the Afon Seiont, falls partly within flood zone C2 and has required detailed consultation with Natural Resources Wales and the Local Planning Authority, Gwynedd Council, to ensure the development is planned in a way that minimises flood risk to the final occupants of the artisan workshops, and more importantly, the holiday lets that are categorised as ‘highly vulnerable’. Careful assessment of the existing, proposed and anticipated tidal flood levels has allowed the development to be planned in a way that places the holiday lets outside of the C2 flood zone, and therefore reduces the extent of flood defence to the development. Workshop units, and other ‘less vulnerable’ uses, within existing and new buildings across the remainder of the site are positioned, adjusted and detailed in a way that provides flood mitigation and resilience measures to reduce the consequences of an extreme flood event whilst maintaining the important heritage and features of this historic site.

Structural Engineering works involved the refurbishment of existing traditional buildings and construction of new steel frame and traditional type buildings. The nature of the site has required detailed coordination with the Architects to understand and detail the significant amount of interfaces between the different structures. Engineering considerations was also required to gain a detailed understanding of the existing buildings to ensure that when constructing in close proximity to existing structures the new structural engineering solutions would not adversely affect that of the existing.