Preface to the third edition

The first edition of Building on fill: geotechnical aspects was published in 1993. The growing importance of the subject, increasing industry experience and expanding knowledge of key technical issues led to the publication of the second edition in 2001.

In the 14 years since the second edition the political impetus to advance the sustainability agenda, and commercial incentive to support that agenda, has continued to grow. A high proportion of new commercial, industrial and housing developments are now taking place on ‘brownfield' land, and a substantial number of these involve building on a range of fill materials. In particular, building on restored opencast sites has increased, with some developments encompassing complete new communities or townships.

While most potential problems associated with building on fill remain essentially the same, the scale and complexity of remediation on many sites has increased, particularly with very deep opencast backfills where there is a substantial depth of unsaturated fill and significant variation in fill depth within the development area. Commercial imperatives demand maximum use of available site area and the selection of remedialtechniques and prediction of post-construction performance of buildings are key issues.

There have been some noteworthy technical innovations in ground treatment since the first edition was published and the 22 years that have elapsed since that time have provided the opportunity to study the behaviour of a wider range of fills and in one case history to extend direct observations of behaviour to over 24 years! As a consequence, this third edition has been expanded to 18 chapters.

The additional chapters on ground treatment recognise the importance of this subject and the fundamental difference in approaches adopted and methods applied, particularly in the use of proprietary and non-proprietary techniques.

The second major expansion is the increase in case histories from 28 in the second edition to 35 in this edition. The case histories are now divided into five chapters reflecting the type of fill encountered. An additional chapter reflects the diverse types of construction located on fill and focuses on recent major building developments in the UK.