A UK engineering company which started out 50 years ago making stiffeners for chimneys, silos and motor casings is set to notch up another big international ‘first’ with its part in a giant construction project at Gatwick Airport. The West Midlands-based Angle Ring Company has provided the key component in the construction of the airport’s stunning new 198m long passenger footbridge, the only one in the world outside the USA to span an aircraft taxiway.
The Angle Ring Company, the UK’s leading expert in the manufacture of curved steel and metal sections for the construction and engineering industries, has provide the crucial component for the spectacular new airport structure. At the heart of the sweeping 2000 tonne footbridge is the steel framework of its curved upper section, manufactured by Angle Ring that gives the structural depth needed to enable a bridge of such an enormous span to exist.
Angle Ring’s Marketing Manager Paul Middleton said: “This has been one of the biggest, most challenging and ambitious steel design and fabrication projects in which we have been involved. We formed an excellent working partnership with the building’s project management team at Arup and their architects, Wilkinson Eyre. Working closely together I believe we have helped create a magnificent monument to the excellence of British design and construction.”
 Final fitting-out work on the footbridge is scheduled for completion this month, after five years under construction. Angle Ring’s involvement with the project began nearly two years beforehand, when BAA and their architects first approached the company to with plans for the manufacture of the walkway’s critical component, the steel core of the footbridge. The result is the extraordinary aerial passenger walkway, with sides entirely encased in glass giving passengers exciting views across the airport.
Angle Ring’s steel fabrication expertise has contributed to the creation of many breathtaking new buildings both in the UK and worldwide, including dazzling leisure and hotel developments in the Middle East and Portsmouth’s new Spinnaker Tower, which the BBC’s Engineering Solutions programme described as one of the most spectacular design projects of the decade.
Angle Ring’s eight-acre specialist manufacturing centre at Tipton in the West Midlands is regularly called upon by pioneering architects and visionary clients to produce ever larger and more complex shapes for the steel skeletons of tomorrow’s award-winning buildings. With so many of today’s global commercial giants rivalling each other to create increasingly bigger, better, bolder, breathtaking new buildings as their international HQs, the path to Angle Ring’s door is one that is set to stay well trodden.
Press Release Issued by Roger Morton MIPR
Jason Leigh Associates
On behalf of: The Angle Ring Company Ltd
Please note: Photographs - ©Arup / Stephanos Samaras
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