RNLI Porthdinllaen.

Saving lives at sea.

The RNLI has operated a station at Porthdinllaen since 1864 – a remote area of outstanding natural beauty. With its building no longer fit-for-purpose (having been originally constructed in 1888), the charity required a brand new building that would allow it to carry out its vital work of saving lives at sea. The development would also be part of a UK-wide project to build 13 new slipway stations to house the latest Tamar class all-weather lifeboat.

Lifelong reliability.

With such an important job, the station needed to function flawlessly. This was always front of mind with the project team: the building had to be extremely durable, requiring no major maintenance for the first 30 years and the slipway having at least a 50-year lifespan.

The location of the site was extremely sensitive, and the design of the project had to consider impact on the environment, local community, and maintaining access to the existing beach. We specified a ground source heat pump to provide sustainable heating, saving both on energy spend and minimising the requirement and cost of energy infrastructure at the remote site.

Inside the box!

As part of the core framework team on this exciting and challenging project, we helped ensure seamless collaboration and teamwork by working with a cloud-based platform called The Box. This allowed all project information to be stored, viewed, and managed in one place.

The RNLI crew were also intimately involved in the process and were able to come onto the site at any time. Through these innovative tools and close collaboration, we were able to meet all planning and environmental regulations for such a sensitive location and deliver the challenging performance demands for a cutting-edge lifeboat station.