Sumo Services: Surveying London's Landscape In Time For The Olympics

January 25, 2012

SUMO Services are helping to transform London's Exhibition Road into one of the most important public spaces in the city's popular cultural district.

The road, which attracts 11 million visitors a year, is home to some of the greatest visitor attractions in the country; an extraordinary collection of world class institutions including the V&A Museum, the Natural History and Science Museums, Imperial College, the Royal Albert Hall, the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal College of Art.

Specialist surveying company SUMO have helped to change Exhibition Road from an area dominated by cars to one that puts people first. The crowded, narrow pavements and heavy traffic have gone and in their place there will be a new streetscape with elegant kerb-free paving surface, new tree planting and street furniture and displays of public art; bringing about a cafe culture feel to the area. The official opening is due on 1st February, in time for the 2012 Olympics.

But to make this ambition a reality and to advance the streetscape design, an accurate and highly detailed topographical map of the building outlines, roads and footways, and a sub-surface map of all of the buried services and tunnels beneath them, had to be made. This is why surveying experts SUMO were brought in.

Accurately mapping the sub-surface was a huge undertaking that first required a search for services maps of the utilities, tunnels and vent shafts some of which were over 150 years old and of doubtful accuracy.

Once this was complete, the existence and exact location of the services and of any previously unmapped sub-surface objects had to be verified. No easy task as this had to be done without digging holes and without disrupting the daily life of Exhibition Road. SUMO carried out the work at night using innovative geophysics survey technologies such as ground penetrating radar.

A vast amount of geospatial data was gathered which then took several months to analyse and turn into properly positioned spatial context. The old services maps were digitised to convert the data into a compatible format and all of the survey data, historical and new was integrated into one highly accurate 3D map in AutoCAD . Once completed SUMO's 3D map contained over 200 layers of information of the urban-infrastructure, buildings, roadways, buried services, tunnels and vent shafts, cellars and below ground anomalies.

The huge volume and complexity of mapping data revealed that the roads and footways were enormously congested below the ground which presented serious challenges that the project managers had overcome to achieve the architect's design.

Colin Carnachan, SUMO Services' Managing Director, said:

"We are proud to have played such an important role in the redevelopment of London for the Olympics. It was a huge and extremely complex project but our comprehensive data helped the project managers to advance with a problem-free architectural design".

SUMO provide a range of large and small surveying services nationwide, including plan collation, utility detection and mapping, measured building surveying and topographic surveying. Request a quotation for your survey here.