A waterfront development in Swansea’s SA1 district ran into a serious problem last year: the boreholes showed 8 metres of soft alluvial clay overlying a weathered coal measure sequence, and the structural loads required a foundation solution that could bypass the compressible layer entirely. The project team had to decide between driven precast piles and continuous flight auger (CFA) piles, balancing cost against the risk of settlement in the adjacent quay walls. In Swansea, where the subsurface shifts from dense glacial till in the upland areas to estuarine silts near the Tawe River, pile foundation design is rarely a simple textbook exercise. We combine local drilling experience with advanced geotechnical analysis to size, test, and verify deep foundations that perform reliably over the long term. For sites with variable stratigraphy, we often integrate the pile design with a CPT testing campaign to obtain continuous soil profiles and refine shaft friction estimates before finalising the pile schedule.
A pile design without a site-specific load test in Swansea’s alluvial zones is a bet against a thousand years of estuarine deposition — and the ground usually wins.
