Geoscience for urban development

The population of London is around seven million. The infrastructure to support this requires London’s ground conditions to be thoroughly investigated and understood. Countless boreholes have been drilled for ground investigation and water supplies. Yet subterranean construction work in London continues to reveal the presence of ‘anomalous’ ground conditions. These occurrences have been discovered in isolation, with no further work to explain them, yet such conditions can prove costly if not predicted by initial site surveys. Thus there is a need to establish a refined geological framework for London, within which these ‘anomalies’ can be explained.