Gatwick
Airport

The building

A new-build airport structure on a concrete and steel frame, taking a full metal roof package plus the glulam-framed canopy that runs along its public face. Standing seam and profiled sheeting over an insulated build-up, with the perimeter details tied into concrete upstands rather than the steel eaves you would get on a shed.

Working airside

Everything about the programme was set by the airport rather than the roof. Permits for each work area, escorted deliveries, tool tethering and FOD control on a roof within sight of the taxiway, and inspection regimes that stop work rather than slow it.

Access was by scaffold and a netted deck slung under the canopy structure — the timber frame could not take a conventional crash deck, so the netting went in first and the roof was built off it.

The detail that mattered

The junction where the new roof meets the in-situ concrete core. Concrete tolerances and metal roofing tolerances are not the same thing, so the upstand flashings were surveyed and folded to the as-built dimensions rather than the drawing, in sections short enough to absorb the movement.