The Kinema in the Woods

The Kinema in the Woods is a cinema in the village of Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, England. Dating back to 1922, this beautiful woodland setting is a protected conservation area.

We were invited to assist with creating a new access road and car park in the sensitive area in which the cinema is located and which is surrounded by hundreds of trees protected by Tree Preservation Orders (TPOs).

The new car park needed to provide root protection for the protected trees in accordance with BS 5837 (2012) and a final surfacing capable of retaining aesthetically pleasing decorative gravels. There was also an entrance area and access road which required the same tree root protection system but with a heavy-duty gravel paving system to permit construction vehicle access during the build phase.

We attended a number of project meetings with the client, who was also the contractor. We successfully agreed on cost-effective and durable Protectaweb TRP as the most appropriate solution and gained approval from all relevant parties, including the conservation officer for Lincolnshire County Council and the landscape architect. Our design solutions delivered an attractive, hard wearing access road and car park which combined tree protection and permeable paving – an engineered SuD’s design which will serve The Kinema for many years to come.

ProtectaWeb Tree Root Protection (TRP) system is a tried and tested solution for building vehicular access, whilst preventing damage to roots of nearby trees, including those covered by preservation orders (TPOs). It is manufactured from perforated and textured HDPE sheets, ultrasonically welded together to create a raft of interconnecting cells.

The system is constructed by laying a pollution control Root-Tex 30 geotextile on the ground which provides separation between the ProtectaWeb raft and the material beneath as well as resistance to the relatively high lateral forces generated by the system.

The core of the ProtectaWeb TRP system is the 3D cellular confinement pockets which are laid, pulled out, pegged in place and filled with clean angular granular stone. The structure locks the grains of the fill material together, spreading imposed loads over a wide area and significantly reducing impact on the material beneath.

A high quality, Root-Tex 10 geotextile is laid on top of the cells, providing a base for the soil root-zone or sand base for the chosen paving system.