Tesco, Workington

Portakabin was brought in to build a new, 13,300sqft interim Tesco supermarket on a brownfield site using its advanced Portakabin Design and Build solution. The company worked tirelessly to install the building in an unprecedented 18 hours. The store was open and trading just 13 days after work started on site. Portakabin and main contractors Johnson Construction worked through the night, completing the installation of the store at 6am ready for shop fitting to begin.

The entire building was manufactured less than a week after Portakabin received the order from Tesco. On site, 26 modules measuring 14 metres long were craned into position in an accelerated programme of one unit every 30 minutes. This involved two teams of ten site staff working in shifts through the night, to achieve a watertight envelope as fast as possible for the shop-fitting teams. The store, which has a retail sales area of 10,000sqft, was a new modular supermarket design that Portakabin had developed with Tesco. It is almost three times the size of the convenience stores manufactured for Tesco previously, and has been engineered to minimise the number of internal columns and maximise clear spans.