Leale’s Yard is ‘an awfully big job’ - Rihoy’s chairman
BUILDING more than 320 houses, a supermarket, retail units and a multi-storey car park will be an ‘awfully big job’, according to the chairman of the construction company lined up to build it.
Jeremy Rihoy said the long-awaited regeneration project was ‘going to be a challenge’.
Extra staff will be needed, he said, to the point where the company would probably need to bring over temporary workers for over the project, estimated to take up to five years.
Due to the construction industry on the island being ‘fairly stretched’ even without this project, he said it would actually be a benefit that a lot of preparatory work would be done in the UK.
The majority of the housing will consist of four or five-storey buildings, but the highest will be six storeys high.
‘If you built them in the traditional way,’ he said, ‘you would need more scaffolding than there is on the island, just for this one site, but we’re not – we’re using modular construction.’
Mr Rihoy explained that each apartment would be built in a factory in the UK, shipped to Guernsey and then craned into place – ‘a completely new way of building for Guernsey’.
It has not been decided whether they will be landed at St Sampson’s or St Peter Port harbour.
‘From ground floor to first floor will probably be a concrete structure and then, from there up, the pre-constructed units come to site,’ he said.
The company is planning on completing the work within five years at the longest.
‘The likelihood is we’ll be finished before that but we don’t want to make promises we can’t keep,’ Mr Rihoy said.
He anticipated that the housing would be complete within three years and once completed, would be sold chiefly to first-time buyers, in preference to investors.
A major part of the challenge would be associated infrastructure, he said.
‘It’s all the roads, the services coming into the site, the water and the electricity.
‘There’s also a significant amount of flood defence work that needs to go into this but actually, the Bridge doesn’t have a history of flooding, so we’re going to put the defences in and hope they’re never needed.’
Asked how Rihoy’s came to be involved in the project, Mr Rihoy said: ‘We’ve been talking to the Co-op for a little while about the possibility of doing something and by a mixture of dark magic – their thinking and ours – we evolved the current scheme.’
He said he was very excited about it.
‘I think it’s a privilege to be involved in something like this. I’m really pleased we’ve got the opportunity and I can’t wait to get going.’
An outline planning application has been submitted to the Development & Planning Authority.
