Introduction
Site levels are important for a competent bridge design, in particular when it is crossing a busy highway and needs to be made accessible to all parties. On 07.11.2016 the UoB and Haselwick students went on a site visit to the A270 and Mithras House Building on the Mouslecoomb campus. My intention of this visit was to get a better ‘feel’ for the site, especially for such factors like the line and level. In order to document this I took some photographs of the location.
Bridge Option 1
We agreed in our group that a crossing spanning the entrance of Mithras House and the proposed Preston Barracks development would be possible. However the change at levels at this location is significant. Therefore, I went out to find these through study of existing topography. Using Digimaps, I downloaded a site plan and overlaid this onto a topography expressed in 5m contours. By overlaying both these levels and the site plan, I could take some levels from the site.
I struggled to establish levels of the lower stairs going up to Mithras House through the desktop study, and in order to establish these levels I used a reasonable assumption from the photographs we took of the site. I then sketched these levels.
Bridge Option 2
An alternative to this crossing point would be at a lower level more towards the corner of Preston Barracks as with the planning application made for the Preston Barracks development. This would still use the same levels as expressed above but instead of crossing at high level, these would cross at the lower platform.