The mixed use development by Benmore Developments was designed by Robinson Patterson Partnership and expands across a full block with frontages onto both Adelaide Street and Alfred Street. The five phase construction programme involved the renovation of an existing mill building into office and leisure space and the construction of a new eight storey office and hotel building with underground parking.


Adelaide Exchange Phases

Phase One: Refurbishment of an existing mill on Adelaide Street to provide office space and an LA Fitness gym.

Phase Two: Demolition of an existing car showroom / workshop and the construction of a double level basement for 183 cars accessed from Afred Street. Details of this complex basement project undertaken by Albert Fry Structural Engineers can be viewed below.

Phase Three: Construction of a 148 bedroom Premier Travel Inn on the Alfred Street side of the scheme, representing an investment of £3.7m by Whitbread Plc. Completion of the hotel structure was April 2007 and the Hotel opened in May 2007.

Phase Four: Construction of further office accommodation fronting onto Adelaide Street in which five floors were let to Liberty IT as their Irish headquarters. The remainder is let to Belfast City Council.

Phase Five: Completed in late 2007 and occupied by Belfast City Council.



Adelaide Exchange IStructE Journal Article:

The following is taken from the IStructE Journal in which Paul Halpin and Alan Mannis from Albert Fry Associates discuss the Adelaide Exchange development and the challenges it presented. Many thanks to Alan Mannis for providing this….

The area directly south of the City Hall in Belfast City centre, known as the Linen Quarter, has been undergoing major development over the past 15 years. One of the larger developments to be completed is the 25 000m² Adelaide Exchange Development between Alfred Street and Adelaide Street. The nine storey mixed use development is already home to US company Liberty’s IT staff, Belfast City Council offices and a 170 bedroom Premier Travel Inn, as well as 183 underground car parking spaces serving the development above.

The linen quarter was historically home to many of the large linen warehouses of the Victorian era, and before this, the area was occupied with industries such as the old gasworks and brickworks. The site itself was previously a car workshop and showroom, and before that, part of the old gasworks on the banks of the Blackstaff River. The Blackstaff had been culverted and rerouted many decades previously and the original route infilled to reclaim extra land in the 1920s and ’30s. With the many and varied previous land uses the ground was contaminated with a mixture of gasworks spoil and oil, which in any case had to be removed from site to allow construction of the basement.

The development has a total frontage onto Adelaide and Alfred Streets of 130m and is bounded on the other sides by adjacent buildings. Extensive desk studies were carried out on the surrounding buildings which varied from early 19th Century, five storey warehouses founded on shallow timber piles to modern, piled seven storey apartments and offices. The ground underlying most of Belfast City centre consists of soft estuarine alluvium and clay over bedrock, which can vary in depth from approximately 15m to more than 30m below surface. Lenses of sand can harbour perched water tables.

The close proximity of the adjacent buildings and streets to the 8m basement excavation was carefully considered and CFA piling with a propped perimeter capping beam anchoring the tops of the CFA piled wall was adopted as the least risk option. Extensive 3D monitoring of the adjacent properties and capping beam was also put in place and continued throughout basement construction works. In the double storey basement construction alone, some 26 000m3 of material was excavated and 279, 750mm diameter CFA perimeter piles along with 891, 600mm diameter CFA bearing piles were installed by Cementation Foundations (Skanska), which also took care of the bulk excavation and coordination of the propping. Bearing piles typically extended to 23m depth below surface and were required to carry both an 80t safe working load and a 30t tension capacity to anchor the basement floor in both the temporary and permanent conditions. Due to the perched water tables and the proximity to the main water table, continuous pumping from well-points was utilised to minimise water ingress into the excavation. A Caltite waterproof concrete by Cementaid was chosen for the lower basement floor slab, designed against hydrostatic uplift, and for the facing internally to the perimeter piled wall, also under hydrostatic head of water. The upper split-level basement slabs were constructed from in situ flat slabs, the main contractor, Patton Construction, opted for ‘roll-out’ type reinforcement mats which minimised fixing time on site. The grid of columns was set typically at 5m, which suited the car parking within the basement and the office grid above, avoiding the need for a deep transfer structure over most of the site. The optimal hotel layout however did not correspond to the basement grid and therefore a transfer structure incorporating 1200mm deep in situ concrete beams was adopted at first floor level within the hotel.

RPP Architects arranged the buildings above basement level around a central. ground level public piazza to maximise natural light. The superstructure of the hotel above first floor level, comprises of a grillage of composite steel beams supported on steel columns. External walls are finished in a mixture of rendered blockwork and red brick in standard cavity construction. The superstructure for the offices uses a mixture of composite long span cellular beams, by Westok and shallow Slimfor beams, by Corus, this allowed for extensive options for service runs to be planned after construction had commenced on site. External finishes to the offices vary from curtain wall glazing, to solid limestone and traditional cavity block wall on the first phase, with extensive secondary steelwork required to stabilise the external walls against the high wind suctions encountered. The second phase offices also use Kingframe insulated cladding panels for the external walls to cut down programme time and site, wet trades. Stability to both the hotel and offices was gained by five separate concrete lift and stair cores rising from foundations to roof level. Patton Construction opted to form the cores using a bespoke climbing formwork to full height prior to erection of the structural steelwork.

The demolition works started in summer 2004 and the development was completed in phased handovers during 2007. 

Structural Engineer: Albert Fry Associates
Consulting Engineer: Delap & Waller
M & E Engineer: JD McGeown
Curtain Walling & Glazing: McMullen Architectural Systems
Quantity Surveyor: Durnien
Agent: Osborne King