Paper and Metal Store

Before we were digital, money, in the form of notes and coins, was moved around the country from secure buildings in secure vehicles. Buildings for storing and sorting cash were unusual, infrequent commissions and often beyond the scope of architects alone. In this case, Don Collins of Barclays Bank Property Division was aided from the outset by Alan Stamp, Project Engineer with White Young and Partners, who claimed at the time that ‘the result proved to be one of the most interesting projects of [his] career’. [1] The pair also drew on advice from the Ministry of Defence to design a building that would withstand military scale assault – the rounded corners of its reinforced concrete walls were intended to deflect missiles launched by attackers! [2] Beyond the fact that there are no windows, the most striking feature of the scheme is its curving roof. According to Stamp the main driver for the roof form was a desire by the client to relieve the solid appearance of the overall form as well as an operational need for a clear span. As the wall construction was so solid, the entire load of the roof could be transferred and a bespoke cable net system carried by a single structural steel arch, cased in concrete, and curved in two directions, was viewed as the optimal solution. 18mm diameter cables at 500mm centres in two directions were anchored to the boundary structure and post tensioned to form the nets. The shape of the nets was calculated computationally by software designed by Professor Hans Buchholdt at the Polytechnic of Central London, who published widely on cable structures. A roof structure such as this would typically by clad in lightweight panels, but here a more robust approach was required, thus it was determined that pneumatically sprayed concrete, shot in two layers, satisfied the technical, security and aesthetic demands. The patented Gunnite technique for this was more regularly used for civil engineering projects, such as tunnels, and, at the time of completion, this was thought to be its largest architectural application. The cocooned interior is entirely mechanically serviced and a heat recovery system exploited the thermal mass of the structure to achieve thermal self-sufficiency. No longer visible from the M6 motorway due to the maturity of the designed landscape, the obscure form rests amongst a group of much more conventional light industrial sheds, silent and immutable.

[1] Stamp, A.D., ‘The “shoe’ that sits by the M6’, Concrete, December 1978, p.12.

[2] ‘Warrington’s Fort Knox’, Building, 8 September 1978, p.57.