Social Housing Developers Community of Practice get the chance to visit the Cascade’s seven-storey CLT structure to see how much progress is being made by Linc Cymru
There are many social housing projects in Wales that use timber structural frames. More and more new homes are being built from timber frames made in a factory, off-site, and delivered to site for rapid assembly. Until now however, there haven’t been many new homes designed using engineered timber.
Inspired by a Passivhaus Conference presentation on CLT and Milan’s Bosco Verticale, Linc Cymru (part of the Pobl Group) made the decision to develop a mid-rise block of apartments in Cardiff’s City Road using a form of engineered timber which is a much more familiar construction material in continental Europe. Cross Laminated Timber, or CLT, is a product made from five layers of solid timber glued together, to make a rigid, strong, lightweight and low carbon alternative to concrete and steel.
The structure for all seven storeys of the new Cascade Tower took shape back in the summer of 2024 where, over the course of a few months, specialist designers, Eurban, erected the individual panels of CLT, which slotted together neatly onsite, within the fine tolerances this engineered material allows.
The Cascade Tower’s CLT structure provides the inner skin of the building’s external walls, all main internal load bearing and compartment walls, floors, roof deck and roof top terraces. The structure sits on reinforced concrete piled foundations with concrete pile caps and ground beams. The outer leaf of its external walls will be faced in brickwork with coated metal cladding to landings and above roof terraces. Windows will be uPVC. Structural steel is used for large spans and the stair and lift core which will home steel stairs and external landings.
Designed with biophilic considerations in mind, the building will have plants growing in containers on facade with an irrigation system and a green roof with photovoltaic panels. The internal space and water will be electrically heated, and the building will have a mechanical ventilation and heat recovery (MVHR) system to bring fresh air into the building and capture the heat energy in the stale air as it leaves the building.
In October, members of our Social Housing Developers Community of Practice got the chance to visit the project, to see how much progress is being made. Linc Cymru’s Richard Hallett and contractor Langstone Construction’s Scott Eames showed us around and described the challenges of building on such a confined city centre site and the precision of the CLT frame once it had been erected.
Cardiff Council has supported Linc Cymru throughout the project. Initially this involved grant allocation within the development programme. Linc Cymru is currently working with the Council on an agreement for the letting and management of the apartments once complete.
The Cascade Tower is a £10.9M project, part funded by Welsh Government through the Innovative Housing Programme and Social Housing Grant. It will provide 48 1 bedroom apartments and has been designed by Cardiff practice Powell Dobson Architects and is being built by Langstone Construction Group. It’s due for completion in September 2025.
In October members of our Social Housing Developers Community of Practice got the chance to visit the project. They were given a tour of the project by Linc Cymru’s Richard Hallett and Langstone’s Scott Eames.
Read more about the Cascade trip: Building to seven storeys with CLT
