North East & Yorkshire

Expansion for Sainsbury’s in Darlington

Sainsbury’s on Victoria Street in Darlington has undergone a £13 million expansion in order to provide more services for the town, almost doubling the space in the north east store.

The project began in January 2012 lasting a total of 33 weeks. The new store launched on 22nd August 2012 and is now fully up and running.

The store now provides improved store facilities and more car parking spaces.

Project manager Paul O’Brien said:

“The project started with a front extension to the store and the construction of a raised deck car park. Then we moved on to work on a side extension at the same time as the refurbishment of the inside of the store and back of house area, restructure of the deli and warehouse.”

Longcross Construction was the main contractor and the architect was Hadfield Cawkwell Davidson.

Longcross can provide a range of services including design and build, management contracting, construction management and traditional construction. The company was set up in the mid-1990s by three founding Directors in order to better deliver what the industry needed. In addition to the Darlington Sainsbury’s store, Longcross have worked on other developments for Sainsbury’s as well as projects at the University of Oxford, Tesco, Imperial College NHS Trust, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Natural History Museum and Pizza Hut.

Hadfield Cawkwell Davidson is based in Sheffield and was established in 1834, becoming a Limited Company on 1st April 2008. The firm now has around 100 professional staff working throughout the country. Hadfield Cawkwell design has worked on numerous projects all differing greatly in design. As well as other Sainsbury’s projects, they have worked on residential projects, shopping centres, leisure centres, restoration projects and engineering projects, such as the New Wembley Stadium in London.

 

The new Sainsbury’s Darlington store now provides over 550 parking spaces, a pharmacy, key cutting services, Sainsbury’s clothing range, cookware range and an improved mezzanine-level restaurant. It’s range of non-food products, including homewares, CD’s and DVD’s have particularly been expanded. There is also a petrol station, recycling services, two ATM’s and customer toilets.

The supermarket has said that the newly refurbished store will create 120 new jobs.

Paul O’Brien told Premier Construction about the build.

He said:

“The extension to the store was a steel frame construction with cladding panels and curtain wall. The car park was a lightweight mezzanine car park.

“It was a difficult build logistically. We had to maintain the level of parking, which meant we needed to build the car park before we took parking spaces away. Logistically it was quite a difficult task with the position of the front extension and the car park going up. We also had limited access with it being within a highly populated residential area and being so close to the town centre.”

“The store was also open while the work was going on; it only closed for seven days.”

The whole store, including staff areas, has been refurbished, allowing Sainsbury’s to increase the scope and availability of the range they can offer.

Paul O’Brien added:

“I have worked on several large jobs for Longcross but obviously this is a high value development, the budget was around £13 million. It was quite a standard build, but the trickiest bit was the access.

For the community, it’s a much improved environment, they’ve got more parking which is also servicing the town centre, and generally you’ve got an excellent improvement to the store.”

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