Gallows Hill

In April last year, Fitzgerald completed a £4.4m S278 scheme on behalf of Warwickshire County Council (WCC) to facilitate new developments on either side of Gallows Hill linking the A452 and A425 between Leamington Spa and Warwick. The developments will provide residential housing, a BMW showroom, and a hotel, with further plans for a small sports stadium in the future.

Completed in April 2024 following 67 weeks of construction, the works involved the widening of the existing carriageway and the realignment and diversion of existing statutory services as well as provision and installation of new supplies and services to both developments. The works also involved construction of a new signalised crossroads with dedicated turning lanes for the main access to the new developments, new footways / cycleways to improve accessibility and safety for cyclists and pedestrians, and new streetlighting, signage and soft landscaping works.

The new junction provides a range of benefits, including facilitating essential access to the two residential developments, reduced congestion, improved journey times and increased business and retail activity in the area through improved links to Warwick and Leamington town centres. Community benefits will also be derived from the upgraded and improved footways and cycleways, enabling more active and sustainable modes of travel, along with better lighting and signage to improve security and wayfinding. Reinforcement and improvements to the local utility networks will improve future resilience for existing and new residents.

Key challenges included:

Effective coordination of utility works: We diverted and protected existing and new utilities, including Gas, Electric (High Voltage and Low Voltage), Water, BT, and Vodafone, several of which were unknown prior to the contract starting. This required significant re-phasing of the works to minimise overall delays. We built and moved our construction programme to accommodate the various lead times the different utility companies required to do their works, integrating their programmes into our overarching construction programme. This effectively required us to build the scheme in reverse. Due to delays in utilities being able to be moved on the north side of the scheme, we built and surfaced the south side first and moved the traffic onto this to mitigate overall delays. There were also significant drainage design issues towards the Europa Way end of the scheme, where a significant proportion of the drainage couldn’t be installed due to clashes with unchartered utilities.  We worked with WCC, their designers and the different utility companies to develop and deliver a successful drainage solution for this area.

Minimising traffic impacts: We planned and phased our works to maintain two-way traffic for the majority of the scheme, keeping the busy Europa Way open throughout the works. A limited period of one-way traffic minimised disruption to the technology park located just past our works. On two separate occasions, we removed our network traffic management arrangements, once to facilitate WCC resurfacing works on another part of the network, and then for the Christmas embargo period.

Effectively ensuring the quality of materials: We dug a borrow pit on site to deal effectively with an issue with poor quality material when we started the road box dig at formation, where the ground was unsuitable.  We used the Class 1A material available from the borrow pit, limiting the time and cost implications of importing material.

The high-quality works were delivered on time and budget, and with minimal disruption. The project continued our collaborative relationship with WCC which has seen us work together to deliver almost £10m of works as part of their strategic programme to upgrade the A452 Europa Way corridor. We are extremely proud of the role this has allowed us to play in providing infrastructure improvements that are reducing congestion, improving journey times, encouraging more sustainable and active travel, and facilitating the provision of new, accessible and high-quality residential and commercial developments along this key route between the M40, Leamington Spa and Warwick.