Piling Contractors in Berkshire and Reading

Village Maid Cheese needed a larger production building at Riseley. The site is rural, and mature Hybrid Black Poplar trees stood within the zone of influence of the new foundation, 21m from the footprint.

We installed 30 steel cased driven mini-piles at 150mm diameter, each driven to firm bearing in the London Clay. Safe working loads ran from 70kN to 160kN across the layout. Each pile was reinforced with a 2H16 rebar cage and set-tested on site before the slab pour.

A driven casing pushes the soil aside instead of bringing it up, so the method leaves no spoil to take off site. The concrete and the rebar cage go inside the steel tube, which stays in the ground.

The raft slab is 154m² at 250mm thick, cast in C28/35 concrete. The building inspector praised the quality of the workmanship. From mobilisation to handover the job took four weeks, on programme.

The Riseley write-up gives a clear picture of that one site. The investigation found sandy clay that does not shrink in the top 1.5m, with London Clay beneath it. The soil near the surface was good. It was the trees, and the shrinkable clay expected lower down, that made piles the right choice for the long-term stability of the building.

For Winkfield the write-up records the concrete class and the heave protection but no soil profile, so we will not describe that ground here. Two sites do not make a map of Berkshire. Send your ground investigation report and the engineer's drawings, and the method will follow from those.