Some interesting Facts and Milestones!
The sheer scale of the Eden building project has ensured a veritable feast of facts and figures ranging from the amazing to the somewhat bizarre.
Here are just a few:
| | the depth of the crater on which the biomes are built is 60m, the size of 35 football pitches |
| | a total of 85,000 tonnes of soil has been made for the project, the equivalent in weight of 616 blue whales |
| | the foundations for the biomes are two metres wide, 1.5m thick and 858m long. Concrete in the foundations is 2480m3 and the reinforcements weigh 284 tonnes |
| | putting up the biomes required the largest birdcage scaffolding in the world - 12 levels, 25 metres across, containing 46,000 poles. In all, 230 miles of scaffolding was erected and it is in the Guinness Book of World Records |
| | the largest biome, the Humid Tropics, is 240m long, 55m high and 110m wide - with no internal supports. It’s large enough to house the Tower of London, tall enough for a tower of 11 double decker buses and long enough for a nose-to-nose traffic jam of 24 buses |
| | the largest hexagon is 10.98m across, big enough to contain a London taxi |
| | the biomes are made up of 625 hexagons, 16 pentagons and 190 triangles. In each one there is 667 tonnes of steelwork, and 536 tonnes of air |
| | the water collection system at the Eden Project on average collects 22litres/sec, the equivalent of 20 thousand bathtubs a day |
AND
FINALLY…
| | it took 12 dumper trucks and eight bulldozers six months to clear 1.8 million tonnes of dirt from the site. This operation is possible in ONE DAY using eight million workers with wheelbarrows each carting one load |
Milestones!
| September 1994: | Plans for the first bid to the Millennium Commission are put in place. |
| November 1994: | Restormel District Council agree a grant of £25,000 for the Eden Project – and the ball starts rolling! |
| November 1995: | Nicholas Grimshaw, the architect behind the innovative international terminal at Waterloo station, agrees to design the main structures for the Eden Project. |
| January 1996: | The first bid for a grant is put to the Millennium Commission, which is rejected. Two further submissions, trimming down costs are then submitted. |
| January 1996: | Regional daily newspaper ‘The Western Morning News’ publishes a close up of Grimshaw’s model of the project –the world’s first glimpse of what is yet to come! |
| May 1997: | The Millennium Commission grants £37.5m to the project team. |
| October 1997: | The Watering Lane Nursery (Pentewen), where the EdenProject’s plants will be grown and quarantined is purchased. |
| October 1998: | Building work on the Eden Project gets underway. |
| December 1998: | Rain stops play, and work at the site is suspended. |
| March 1999: | The bulldozers and dumper trucks are back in action and work flat out for six months to clear the site. |
| March 2000: | Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest agree a pioneering public private sector financing package. |
| May 2000: | Phase One – The Gateway to Eden – opens to the public. Between now and January 2001, half a million visitors will come to watch the Big Build. |
| October 2000: | The first trees are planted in the Humid Tropics Biome. |
| December 2000: | The Millennium Commission grants further funds to the Eden Project, to enable the project to deal with the successful public response and its confirmed international profile. These extra monies were awarded on the strict basis they were matched, and this has now been achieved. The total cost of building the project is £86m, £43m of which has been contributed by the Millennium Commission. |
| January 2001: | Phase One closes so that the final construction work can be completed on the link building, and modifications made to the visitor centre. |
| March 2001: | The Eden Project opens fully to the public. |