Case Study – Greener Ipswich

The Greener Ipswich Group aims to kickstart the regeneration of the town, more trees and green spaces will improve the town centre and waterfront and improve footfall between the two areas. Having obtained funding through the government’s ‘The Town Deal’ fund the project is managed by Ipswich Borough Council.

Through Make Space Landscape Architecture Limited we were invited to tender for topographic, buried utilities and CCTV surveys along an urban street route running downhill from the Cornhill to the waterfront, approximately 500m in length, to inform design of new green spaces and planting along the route.

The topographic survey was carried out with a Leica TS13 total station using a linear traverse controlled at regular intervals with a Leica GS16 GNSS receiver connected to the SmartNet correction service. In carriageway features and levels were surveyed using non-contact laser measurement to avoid the necessity of physical access to the carriageway and the attendant safety risk.

Prior to commencement we obtained service providers records from Utility Site Search and reviewed the services that we would be likely to encounter.

The buried utilities survey took place after the topographic plans were ready and used a combination of Radio Detection EML equipment, Proceq ground penetrating radar, removal of inspection covers where permitted and visual observation to map utilities running below this busy urban streetscape.

Our partners at HSM traffic management obtained permissions and licensing and provided temporary traffic signals to enable safe scanning within the carriageway, and later for the CCTV survey work also. The work was carried out at night to avoid excessive disruption to town centre traffic.

Once the utilities survey had identified the extent of the drainage network our CCTV team attended site to carry out a condition survey of those elements of the network requested by the client using a combination of push rod and powered crawler equipment.

The final product dispatched to the client was an AutoCAD drawing with separate layouts for topographic survey and utilities, PDF versions of the drawing sheets, a condition report for the drainage and a PDF compilation of utilities service providers maps and information.