St. James Street (London)


St. James Street (London)

Bespoke lift in St James Street, London

St James Street is one of the best-known and most distinguished streets in the central London district of St James, running down from Piccadilly to St James Palace and Pall Mall.

One of our best customers in the United Kingdom, a lift installation company with a well-founded reputation for excellence, recently entrusted us with the design and manufacture of a lift for a listed building in this emblematic London street. The project posed some interesting challenges:

  • The installation of a passenger lift in a shaft of very reduced dimensions, including limited pit depth and headroom clearance.
  • The need to pay due respect to the particular architectural and structural characteristics of a very unique building.
  • The design of a lift car made to measure and finished with special materials chosen to blend harmoniously in with the building’s architecture and design.

The lift design solution

After carrying out a highly detailed study of the technical specifications of the project and the various design solutions available, IMEM Lifts finally proposed the manufacture of a lift system which includes a machine room and uses a drum drive unit, where the car hoist rope is led around the drive sheave, removing the need for a counterweight inside the shaft and thereby increasing the space available for the lift car, supported on a centred sling.

The lift carries 4 passengers, has a 300Kg (661lbs) rated load capacity – the maximum available given the shaft dimensions – and serves 6 stops with an overall travel distance of 15.18 metres (49.8ft). The plan area of the car is 0.79m² (8.5ft²) in a shaft of 1065x1065mm (1.13m²/12.16ft²).

These unusually small dimensions meant that we had to design and manufacture in correspondingly reduced sizes all the mechanical elements which support the electrical control components in the shaft – such as the position sensors, limit switches and overspeed governors, as well as the uppermost stanchion fixed to the shaft ceiling (incorporating a shock absorber, in compliance with EN 81-21:2009), in order to minimise their visual impact on this panoramic lift.

300 Kg

Shaft ceiling: 1065x1065mm

6 stops

IMEM LIFT