Gantries for National Highways

3. Vision

National Highways would like to create a gantry family that sits sympathetically within their surroundings, to enhance the user experience of the major road network and contribute to carbon Net Zero goals.

Refining the appearance of gantries to create an elegant, visually sympathetic design will:

  • form a cohesive approach away from amalgamated structures (those functional structures with added modules and features) to help declutter the visual impact of the network
  • provide an aesthetic link to other elements of the highway and reduce the impact on its environment
  • achieve efficient processes for design and construction
  • increase sustainability and carbon reduction through the application of efficiency savings and material choices

The network hosts a significant quantity of these gantry superstructures, which often vary in design on a scheme-to-scheme basis and are used to support a range of ancillary signage and equipment such as electronic signs, direction signs, speed cameras and CCTV. The creation of a gantry family will form a set of standardised designs to enable more consistent supply and visual identity.

It is the intention of this design competition to create designs for two common gantry superstructures, the Cantilever Gantry and Super-span Cantilever Gantry. It is also important to recognise the need for a consistent and coherent look and feel across the network, a National Highways visual identity. As such it will be important to understand how the design might be applied to the other common superstructures, the Portal Gantry and Super-span Portal Gantry. A secondary benefit would be the potential to retrofit aspects of the design to existing structures for wider recognition of the visual identity.

Proposed designs will need to be elegant, functional, sustainable, safe and address the standardisation and modularisation of the gantry family and the mounted technology. They need to sympathetically incorporate the signage and equipment, such that the components fit together visually as well as physically whilst maintaining function and performance.