Essex roofing specialist Imperial Roofing has installed 8,000 sq m of Norbord’s Sterling Roofdek for the top of the Wembley Arena – London’s top music venue.

Imperial is carrying out the roofing work as part of the £25 million redevelopment of the Arena complex by Quintain Estates. The work involves a complete internal reconfiguration of the concert hall, relocating the stage to the western end of the building and positioning the main entrance at the opposite end, where it opens onto a new public square.

Jonathan Forbes-Brown, founder and owner of Imperial Roofing says he chose Roofdek for two principal reasons: performance and the environment. “In smaller roofing projects you can use ordinary square-edge OSB” says Mr Forbes-Brown. “However, due to the span required, Roofdek is more appropriate.”

Made from OSB3, a high quality structural oriented strand board, Roofdek is designed especially for roofing applications and has tongue-and-grooved edges to ensure structural stability over large flat areas.

Mr Forbes-Brown is a strong advocate of construction products that do not harm the environment – hence the company’s use of environmentally-friendly roofing membranes. He adds: “By using OSB, we avoid the destruction of tropical rainforests by putting acres of hardwood ply on roofs”.

Norbord’s OSB scores environmentally because it is made from thinnings - the immature trees removed from sustainably-managed European forests to allow the larger, healthier trees to grow to maturity. “It’s a by-product of the forestry industry and it has a positive environmental impact”, says Mr Forbes-Brown.

The Roofdek is being applied as an overlay on a large part of the Arena’s 13,000 sq m, 22.5° pitched roof. Built in the 1930s for the Empire Games, the Grade II listed building originally housed an Olympic swimming pool and was covered with a huge 22.5 degree pitched roof – of which two-thirds was patent glazing. This was later replaced with wood-wool slabs after the building was converted to host concerts.

“These slabs have no strength of their own and so we can only fix through into their frames – around the edges”, explains Mr Forbes-Brown. This means that the Roofdek panels cannot all be fixed along their edges. “The tongue-and-groove edging provides the support we need here, because each board supports its neighbour”, adds Mr Forbes-Brown.

The size of this roof required the installation of approximately 2,000 Roofdek boards supplied by Imperial’s local branch of Travis Perkins. “We stock most Norbord products, but this was a very big order, so we had to obtain a price from Norbord and then quote to supply the boards to Imperial”, comments Carl Britton, Travis Perkins’ Braintree branch manager.

Imperial Waterproofing is now finishing the roof with a Firestone single-ply membrane which is applied directly to the Roofdek surface with a special adhesive.

Work on the roofing contract began in April and is due for completion early next year when the Arena will once again host some top international artists - Depeche Mode, Westlife, Anastacia, Lee Evans and Alice Cooper are already booked to appear.

For further information, call 01786 812 921 or visit website www.norbord.com.