A41 Bicester Village Highways Construction

Due to a significant expansion of the popular retail outlet at Bicester Village in Oxfordshire, Fitzgerald Contractors were appointed as principal contractor by Value Retail to undertake the upgrade of the existing A41 approach highway and junctions together with the dualing of the existing private access road into the retail village. The scope of works also included the construction of a new ‘Hamburger Island’, a key part of the scheme’s aim to alleviate historic traffic congestion with the retail village receiving up to 60,000 daily visitors.

Our client’s main concern was maintaining the capacity of visitor parking spaces during the works and ensuring that the operations of the village, as well as vehicle and pedestrian access and customer experience was not adversely affected.

Prior to the scheme’s commencement the Fitzgerald team undertook a full preconstruction workshop with our supply chain to discuss the scheme and collaborate in order to safely deliver works whilst mitigating any potential impacts. The scheme required extensive reconstruction of the existing highway infrastructure together with significant statutory utility works. Our planned works included:
• Strict pre-excavation procedures to ensure that no services were damaged and services were maintained to the retail businesses. This was particularly important for financial transactions within the retail village whereby the data transfer was via underground cables
• Undertaking temporary traffic management which involved off peak lane closures whilst maintaining existing highway traffic lane capacity at all times, surfacing work was undertaken at night
• Our methodology was devised to increase the capacity of the carriageway at the earliest opportunity, i.e. widening works on the approach roads
• One of the key challenges was the requirement to construct the new roundabout whilst increasing the earthworks levels by 1 metre, this was safely achieved whilst still maintaining traffic flow