National Badminton Centre, Milton Keynes

The National Badminton Centre is the home of the GB squad and the headquarters of Badminton England. In addition to this it is a focal point for local clubs in the area and hosts many county and National tournaments. Here we worked to improve their existing car park.

What the Client Wanted

As with most commercial works that we carry out, when we get the enquiry to rejuvenate a car park it’s usually in a pretty bad way, or they’ve been dealing with a design floor for a long time that needs rectifying. Both were true of the National Badminton Centre in Milton Keynes. Many areas of the car park were suffering with large, unavoidable potholes that must have been daily irritant to the employees, athletes and general public that use the facility. These are often easy to fix on a budget, and we often carry out these patch repairs, but this site came with another issue. All the parking bays that were set off of the main access drives were deep shingle areas, set within raised concrete edged boundaries. Shingle / gravel drives and parking bays are often a good budget solution, but in this instance they were quite deep and so driving and walking over these areas was problematic. We were asked to resolve this and so offered a number of options, including a full removal of this gravel, edgings, and demarcation kerbs, and installation of asphalt surfacing overlay. It is often the case that we are asked for a range of solutions and we’ll provide an appropriate fix for all budgets, but in most cases, and for this situation, the most costly but definitely the most effective and long lasting solution is a full resurfacing of the area.

Preparation Works

The preparation required for this job took a number of days and involved excavation these gravel parking areas, along with the removal of all edgings and kerbed parking bays. We also had to adjust levels of the existing surface course throughout the car park using a planing, or milling, machine. The groundworks were extremely important to make sure the final surface course was set for the correct drainage of surface water.

Surfacing Works

Using our Ammann Paveing Machine and some isolated hand lay areas, we first regulated the parking bays with AC20 DBM (20mm Asphalt Concrete 20mm Dense Binder Material). Once these areas and any other low areas or those requiring repair had been completed we applied a tack coat emulsion to improve the adhesion of the new surface course. Then we overlaid the whole car park with 30mm depth of 10mm SMA (Stone Mastic Asphalt) Surface Course. This is a particularly hard wearing asphalt surface course ideal for this use. To finish everything off, White Thermoplastic Lining was applied to the new parking lay out.

A successful project all round and a satisfied customer. We hope to work with The National Badminton Centre in the future as they continue to improve and develop their centre.

Mark Edwards
Surveyor, Edwards Surfacing