NHS Hinchingbrooke Hospital: shuttering to millimetre precision

The brief

Carpentry from the ground up on an NHS site

NHS Hinchingbrooke Hospital in Huntingdon needed a brand new four storey sleeping accommodation block for hospital staff and members. The building method chosen was modular: prefabricated ZED Pods, manufactured off site and craned into position on a prepared concrete base.

That decision moves nearly all the risk onto the foundations. A pod that arrives finished cannot be adjusted, packed or trimmed on site. Whatever is cast into the ground has to be exactly where the drawing says it is, in all three dimensions, or the pods do not land. AJB Group was brought in to build the formwork that produced those bases.

The work followed Apex Demolition, an NHS approved contractor, who held the groundworks. AJB Group stepped on in May 2026 for phase one and returned in July 2026 for phase two.

What we did

450 x 450 shutter boxes ahead of 58 pours

Phase one was the install of the shuttering pods themselves: 450 x 450 shutter boxes, built and set ahead of 58 concrete pours that took place on the Friday of that week. Fifty eight pours in one operation means fifty eight boxes that all have to be finished, braced and signed off before the concrete arrives. There is no partial completion on a pour day.

Millimetre precision, worked alongside the site engineers

The team worked alongside the site engineers throughout, because these boxes had to be fitted to millimetre precision to land the prefabricated ZED Pods on. That is a tighter tolerance than most carpentry ever sees. It is set out from engineers' setting out data rather than an architect's plan, checked instrument by instrument, and braced hard enough that the pressure of wet concrete does not move it while it goes off.

This is what shuttering and formwork actually is as a trade: temporary timber work whose only job is to make permanent concrete land in exactly the right place, then be stripped away and never seen again.

Phase two: shuttering and plinth blocks

AJB Group returned to site in July 2026 for Apex Demolition on phase two of the shuttering and plinth block install. By that visit the four storey apartment block was standing on the phase one work, and the level of engineering and structural works required to make that happen genuinely took the team by surprise. The plinth blocks are the interface between the cast base and the pods themselves, and they carry the whole structure.

Ground to roof coverage

Hinchingbrooke is the clearest example of what AJB Group means by covering carpentry from the ground up. The same employed carpenters who set formwork on a hospital site also cut roofs, hang fire doors and fit kitchens on other contracts, which is why a main contractor can hand over one package rather than tendering each stage separately.