Met Geo Environmental has been working with the British Library at Wetherby in North Yorkshire to inform plans for the development of some of the most advanced news archive storage facilities in the world.
Part of a 70 year master plan for the UK’s National Library, the latest construction is a state of the art building whose principal use will be the storage of newspapers. The building is designed to be air tight to help create a controlled low oxygen environment. To achieve this, very strict tolerances must be achieved for the build.
The buildings at the British Library’s Wetherby site are evolved from an old military establishment and records of some services are sketchy.
Met Geo Environmental was contracted by the British Library’s Client Retained Technical Team to carry out verification surveys, including utility tracing, for this latest £10million expansion building will have regional, national and international significance.
After creating the original control network to be used throughout all phases of construction, Met’s principal role was to check the main steel column positions and the verticality of this steelwork, thereafter providing tabulated results which compared the design positions against actual set out positions
The Northern region of Kier Construction is in charge of the initial stages of building with Mott Macdonald Ltd appointed by the British Library as the Client Technical Team who in turn employed Met Geo Environmental.
About the British Library
The British Library is the National Library of the UK and the world’s largest library and research resource holding over 150 million items from multiple countries, in multiple languages and formats.
The Library’s collections include around 14 million books along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 2000 BC.
The British Library adds some three million items every year occupying 9.6 kilometers (6.0 miles) of new shelf space.
The British Library website: http://www.bl.uk/