2-879-166 - Historic England Archive/Heritage Images

Heathrow Airport, BEA Servicing Hangar, Heathrow, Hillingdon, London, 27/02/1970. A man looking upwards in a 75ft shaft lined with reinforcement steel, part of the foundations of the BEA aircraft servicing hangar at Heathrow Airport. In October 1969 Laing announced that its Industrial Engineering Branch had been awarded a contract for construction of an aircraft servicing hangar for British European Airways at Heathrow Airport. It was the company’s second major contract at Heathrow, following the completion of the BEA and BOAC cargo terminal. The hangar was designed to accommodate new airbus jets and existing aircraft. Four 75ft shafts were sunk for the foundations. The excavation of each shaft began with an in situ concrete ring beam near ground level. Rings of a caisson, which formed the upper half of each shaft, were then sunk through 30ft of clay. Men worked at the bottom of the shaft to excavate the remaining 45ft, and fixed precast segmental concrete rings to the structure as the shaft descended. Construction of the shafts began in October 1969, and when completed they were filled with concrete in two stages: the lower sections were filled with 250 cubic yards of concrete in a continuous pour on 27th February 1970, and the upper sections were filled after a column was positioned in each shaft. This photograph was published in the April 1970 edition of Team Spirit, the Laing employee newsletter.