Topo survey & Utility Mapping | British Library

Met Consultancy Group (Met) has been working with the British Library providing a mix of topographical and utility mapping services over the years. We were contracted by the British Library’s Client Retained Technical Team to carry out verification surveys for the latest £10million expansion. 

Met has carried out a number of different surveys for the British Library, including utility tracing. The building evolved from an old military establishment and records of some services are sketchy meaning verification surveys have been needed in the past.

The new buildings are some of the most advanced library storage facilities in the world which forms part of a 70 year master plan for the British Library. The latest construction is a state of the art building whose principal use will be the storage of newspapers. The building is designed to be air tight to help create a controlled low oxygen environment. To achieve this, very strict tolerances needed to be achieved for the build.

The Northern region of Kier Construction were in charge of the initial stages of building and Mott Macdonald Limited were appointed by the British Library as the Client Technical Team who in turn employed Met to carry out verification surveys at appropriate times.

After creating the original control network to be used throughout all phases of construction our principal role was to check and report the main steel column positions and the verticality of this steelwork, thereafter providing tabulated results which compared the design positions against actual set out positions.

This new British Library buildings have regional, national and international significance and Met are excited about contributing towards the success of this project.

Did you know…?

The British Library is the National Library of the UK and is the world’s largest library in terms of total number of items. The library is a major research library holding over 150 million items from many countries, in many languages and in many formats, both print and digital: books, manuscripts, journals, newspapers, magazines, sound and music recordings, videos, play-scripts, patents, databases, maps, stamps, prints, drawings. The Library’s collections include around 14 million books along with substantial holdings of manuscripts and historical items dating back as far as 2000 BC.

As a legal deposit library, the British Library receives copies of all books produced in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, including a significant proportion of overseas titles distributed in the UK. It also has a programme for content acquisitions. The British Library adds some three million items every year occupying 9.6 kilometres (6.0 miles) of new shelf space.