Caravan Park Pool Enclosure

The client, Covewood, is based in North Wales where they operate a number of caravan parks - This one is Cardigan Bay Holiday Park at Poppit Sands, Cardigan.

The site had a small pool which was replaced by a much larger free form pool and two spas.

They decided on this type of enclosure because they wanted to retain the outdoor pool but needed to guarantee their clients, mainly young families, that they would be able to use the pool in the summer if weather was not good and in addition they wanted to extend their season. They viewed several of Summit's other commercial installations and liked the fact that a unit could be designed specifically to their requirements – particularly the increased height required to cope with the indoor trees, bridge and raised spa area.

The enclosure is 26 metres long and has an average width of 19 metres, with a height of 4.5 metres. Normally our elements are 2 metres long but for this project each moveable section was made 4 metres long to minimise the number of units to be moved when opened. To facilitate easy opening the enclosure has electric motors which are operated by solar charged batteries.

The deadline was to have the project completed was the May Bank Holiday and there were a number of contractors involved on the project whose work was co-ordinated by the park owner and his architect. Basic ground work and construction of the pool shell was started in late 2009, however horrendous weather conditions delayed progress badly. Summit were allowed to arrive on site in early January to part erect the enclosure to provide some shelter for the pool company to undertake the finishing work on the pool shell. Storms and very high winds hampered the build but a roof was in place by the end of January and then Summit returned 6 weeks later to complete the structure. Apart from some minor building works around the plant room and changing rooms, everything was complete and on time.

Because the location is so prone to bad weather local building control were particularly anxious to ascertain the strength of the structure. The traditional strength calculations supplied for this purpose related to lower buildings and were not accepted so the project details were given to the French company CSTM who specialise in testing and proving engineering strength data for a multitude of international names who include Peugeot, Renault and Onera aerospace. 100 pages of data were produced proving the building was in fact even stronger than we had specified and far in excess of the requirements called for.

Apart from that, the only problems were several contractors all under huge pressure to complete and continually needing to work in each others space. However, co-operation and solutions were always found and ensured a successful conclusion.

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