London Museum calcined clay concrete: site mix lessons for structural engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

First reported on New Civil Engineer
30 Second Briefing
Use of calcined clay concrete on the London Museum project, led by Sir Robert McAlpine with close input from engineers, contractors and materials suppliers, is enabling on-site deployment of a lower-clinker, lower-carbon mix rather than limiting it to precast elements. The team is adapting mix design and placing methods in real time on a live heritage-site build, addressing workability, setting time and strength-gain behaviour under typical UK site conditions. For practitioners, this signals growing confidence in calcined clay binders for mainstream structural applications where conventional CEM I would previously have been specified.
Technical Brief
- Experience from this live heritage project is expected to inform specification clauses for calcined clay in future UK builds.
Our Take
Within the Materials category, only a subset of the 292 tag-matched pieces focus on UK-based projects, so the London Museum project gives a relatively rare look at how low-clinker concretes are being trialled in a dense urban and heritage-sensitive setting.
Sir Robert McAlpine’s involvement on this United Kingdom scheme aligns with our coverage of major contractors using high-profile public projects to de-risk lower-carbon concrete mixes before wider rollout across commercial portfolios.
Because calcined clay systems often require mix-specific testing and on-site verification, the London Museum project is likely to generate performance data that can be reused by other UK clients and designers, potentially accelerating approvals for similar sustainable concrete products.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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