Concrete Cutting in Bankside

Bankside is a hard place to cut concrete, and almost none of the difficulty is the concrete. The stretch of Southwark riverside between Blackfriars Bridge and London Bridge is one of the densest pedestrian environments in the country, wrapped around Tate Modern, Borough Market and the railway viaduct, and the working constraints come from the setting rather than the slab.

Bankside sits inside the Central Activity Zone, which is the strictest part of London's plant emissions regime. Every diesel saw, generator and compressor we bring into Greater London has to meet Stage IV of the Non-Road Mobile Machinery standard, which became the London-wide minimum on 1 January 2025, and every machine has to be listed on the NRMM register for the site before it turns a blade. Borough enforcement officers do check on site. It is worth asking any contractor quoting for London work to confirm both, because a machine that fails the check is a machine that goes home.

The second constraint is space. There is nowhere at street level to stand a compound, so plant is carried in, run off a spur, and carried out the same shift. That pushes the job towards electric rigs and hydraulic power packs rather than petrol, which is usually the right answer here anyway: much of the cutting is inside occupied buildings where exhaust has nowhere to go.

The building stock is unusually mixed. Nineteenth-century brick vaults and railway arches sit against 1990s and 2000s commercial frames, and behind Tate Modern there is the legacy of Bankside Power Station: heavy industrial foundations that do not appear on a modern drawing. Post-tensioned slabs are common in the office buildings put up along Southwark Street, and a post-tensioned slab is the single strongest argument for stitch drilling rather than sawing, because a severed tendon is a structural event, not a snag.

Anything within reach of the river also means water. Basements here are deep and tanked, and cutting through a tanked structure without a plan for reinstating the waterproofing creates a problem that outlasts the programme by years.

Southwark's residential population is threaded through the commercial estate, so noisy work is tightly controlled by hours, and permission for a night shift is not a formality. In practice most Bankside cutting is booked either as an early start before the footfall builds, or as a weekend possession where the building can be closed. Slurry has to be collected rather than run to gully: the drainage here goes to the Tideway system and a contractor tipping slurry into it is creating an environmental incident.

This page is part of our concrete cutting in London coverage. For the service itself, including cut depths, plant and specification, see concrete cutting.